BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



THE SACRED ANTHOLOGY: 

* A book of Ethnical Scriptures. Collected and edited 
by M. D. Conway. 

"The purpose of the work is simply moral. The editor has believed 
that it would be useful for moral and religious culture if the sympathy 
of Religions could be more generally known, and the converging testi- 
monies of ages and races to great principles more widely appreciated." 
— Kxtract from Preface. 

"A collection of passages from those books of a moral or religious 
character, which, having commanded the veneration of the races among 
which they were produced, are the least accessible to European readers. 

Scandinavian fables and English proverbs side by side with the 

sacred utterances of Hindu, Chinese, Hebrew, Parsi, and Persian 

literature A book for which devout persons and students of ethics 

owe him many thanks Mr. Conway, with his eager, poetic instincts, 

his warm feelings and wide sympathies, is a good guide to those in search 
of what is most impressive to the imagination, or stimulating to the 
sensibilities." — N. Y. Tribune. 

"I could wish that some such book as this Anthology might be put 
into the hands of every minister in America." — Liberal Christian. 

HENRY HOLT CO., 

Publishers, New York. 



THE 



EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE 




MONCURE D. CONWAY 

Author of " The Sacred Anthology.''' 



Respect the gods, but keep them at a distance. 

Confucius. 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
1874 




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by 

MONCURE D. CONWAY 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of 
New York. 



48 65 5 5 

JUL 2 3 1942 



The pure Earth is situated in the pure Heavens. 

The soul which has passed through life with purity and 
moderation obtains the gods for fellow-travellers and guides, 
and rests in the abode suited to it. There are indeed many and 
wonderful places in the Earth, and it is neither of such a kind 
nor of such a magnitude as is supposed by those ioho are 
accustomed to speak of the Earth, as I have been persuaded by a 
certain person. 

Socrates. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME FOR THAT 

WHICH Is 17 

I. 

The Habitat of Christianity .... 31 

II. 

The Church Auction 41 

III. 

St. Alban's . 53 

IV. 

An Old Shrine Gl 

V. 

Isengrimm 79 



viii 



CONTENTS. 



VI. 

PAGE 

Zauberpfeife 89 

VII. 

Contrivances 95 

VIII. 

Christian Idealism 105 

IX. 

The Cross 115 

X. 

Via Crucis 125 

XI. 

Pentecost. . . . . . . . 145 

XII. 

Bunhill Fields 153 

XIII. 

The Old Tabard 161 

XIV. 

The Doctrine of Trust . . . . . 175 

XV. 

One Voice ........ 187 



CONTENTS. ix 



XVI. 

PAGE 

Cross Koads 195 

XYII. 

A Fete-Dieu at Trouville 207 

XVIII. 

A Vigil 217 

XIX. 

Old Temples 227 

XX. 

Christ on the Ass 235 

XXI. 

" Deo erexit Voltaire " 245 

XXII. 

Confessions op Christendom 257 

XXIII. 

An English Sinai 265 

XXIV. 

Graves at Bournemouth 279 

XXV. 

The Cataract and the Rainbow .... 297 



X 



CONTENTS. 



XXYI. 

PAGE 

The Unchurched 307 

XXVII. 

The Rejected Stone 317 

XXVIII. 

Pixy- led . .- 341 

XXIX. 

Our Eumenides 353 

XXX. 

" Godless Schools " 363 

XXXI. 

The G-od with the Hammer 373 

XXXII. 

The Pilgrim's Last Reflections .... 387 



HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME 
FOR THAT WHICH IS. 



B 



When will you take us as a dear father takes his son by both 
hands, 0 ye gods, for whom the sacred grass is trimmed ? 

Whither now ? On what errand of yours are you going, in 
heaven, not on earth ? 

Big-Veda-Sanhtta. 



The stars tell all their secrets to the flowers, and if we only 
knew how to look around us we should not need to look above. But 
man is a plant of slow growth, and great heat is required to bring 
out his leaves. He must be promised a boundless futurity to induce 
him to use aright the present hour. In youth fixing his eyes on 
those distant worlds of light, he promises himself to attain them, and 
there find the answer to all his wishes. His eye grows keener as he 
gazes, a voice from the earth calls it downward, and he finds all at 
his feet. 

Margaret Fuller. 



HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME 
FOR THAT WHICH IS. 

ARLY in my childhood, my parents en- 
trusted me to the care of the well-known 
guide, Mr. Bunyan, to be taken from the 
City of Destruction to the Celestial City, where 
they themselves had long resided. My venerable 
and kind guide beguiled the way with interesting 
stories, but could not prevent its being a hard journey. 
Indeed, when we came to the chief difficulties and 
dangers of the road, he would generally disappear 
from my side, confessing that he could not render 
me any assistance, and joining me again only where 
the way became pleasant and plain. So ere I reached 
my teens I had struggled in the Slough of Despond, 
and before they had passed had conversed alternately 
with Messrs. Greatheart and Feeblemincl, encoun- 
tered Apollyon, and seen the inside of Doubting 
Castle. 

At last, not without some wounds and bruises, I 




20 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



fell swooning at the gates of the city. On waking, 
I found myself inside, surrounded by many friends 
and relatives, who warmly congratulated me on my 
escape from the City of Destruction and the perils 
of the way, and had much to say in praise of the 
Lord of the city in which they lived. The title 
of this great potentate was, I learned, the Prince of 
Otherworldliness, and my sole occupation would be 
to sit upon a purple cloud with a golden trumpet, 
through which I was to utter perpetually glorifica- 
tions of his magnificence, and inform him how much 
reason he had to be satisfied with himself. 

For a time this was pleasant enough. The 
purple cloud acted as a screen against many dis- 
agreeable objects. The dens of misery and vice, 
the hard problems of thought, the blank misgivings 
of the wanderers amid worlds unrealised, were all 
shut out from view ; and though I was expected, as 
a matter of form, to say I was a miserable sinner, it 
was with the distinct understanding that I was all 
the more our Prince's darling for saying so. 

At length, however, the novelty of all this began 
to wear off. I felt my arms getting stiff with disuse. 
It seemed to me that our Prince must be sufficiently 
aware by that time of his grandeur, and it appeared 
almost egotistical to call his attention further to my 
own insignificance, besides the doubtful sincerity of 
doing so while I regarded myself as one of his elect. 
But, alas, these were but the beginnings of my per- 



HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME. 21 

ception of the drawbacks attending a residence in 
the domain of Otherworldliness. Reports were con- 
stantly reaching us of pilgrims who had perished 
by the way in a certain pit whose fiery mouth my 
guide had pointed out to me on the journey from 
the City of Destruction. I was expected to rejoice 
in, rather than commiserate, their fate, as being 
essential to the dignity of our sovereign; but this 
was very difficult, and the more I reflected on the 
subject, the more it seemed to me a questionable 
source of majesty. 

As time waxed on, I perceived that our city was 
not only growing in size, but altering its character. 
Going one day to the city gate, I found that it had 
been removed to make way for a much broader 
entrance, and I met a very miscellaneous crowd 
coming in. Seeing that they were much fresher in 
their looks than I had been after the same journey, 
I conversed with some of them, and learned for the 
first time that the Celestial Railway had been 
opened, and that this had led to a tide of immigra- 
tion. The pilgrim could now travel in a first-class 
carriage, and his pack be checked through. A 
pilgrim has since made the world familiar with this 
result of the enterprise of Mr. Smooth-it-away. 
His account, however, is, as I have learned, not 
entirely accurate ; for instance, the Slough of 
Despond was not filled up by volumes of French 
and German philosophy, but by enormous editions 



22 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



of an English work showing the safest way of in- 
vesting in Both Worlds. Moreover, it is but just to 
say that the engineering feat by which the Hill 
Difficulty was tunnelled is due to Professor Moon- 
shine, whose works showing that the six days 
of creation mean six geological periods, and that 
miracles are due to the accelerated workings of 
natural law, also furnished the material of a patent 
key, by which many pilgrims are enabled to pass 
with ease through Doubting Castle. The new pil- 
grims informed me that most of them had been for 
some time residing in Vanity Fair, but that, by 
various measures of conciliation, that fascinating and 
fashionable resort had become a suburb of the 
Celestial City, and was incorporated with the do- 
main of Otherworldliness. Having read in Mr. 
Bunyan's Guide-Book that our city was of pure 
gold, they had some thoughts of settling in it. Many 
of them having thus established themselves in our 
realm, it began to show startling changes. There had 
been, for instance, no part of my old road along which 
I had passed more shudderingly than the Plain Ease 
and Lucre Hill, where I heard the groans of those 
who had fallen through its treacherous sward into 
the silver-mines. What was my astonishment now T 
to see a beautiful park of just the same kind, a hill 
the very image of Lucre Hill, made in the very 
centre of our city ! This place became the fashion- 
able promenade and place of resort. Ladies there 



HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME. 23 

displayed the cross as a golden ornament, and all 
around it was a bazaar, where the pearl of price was 
dealt in by tradesmen, who rejoiced in the inscription 
over the park-gates — " Godliness is Gain." 

There gradually grew within me a deep mis- 
giving, and I began to dwell on memories of the 
so-called City of Destruction, on which, as I was 
surprised to learn, fire had not yet been rained 
down. One day I got hold of a journal printed in 
that city. From it I learned that there were things 
going on there which seemed strangely inconsistent 
with the bad character I had always heard given 
to it. Men and women there, so I read, were 
devoting their energies to the education of the ig- 
norant, the help of the poor ; they were searching 
reverently into the laws of nature ; they were cele- 
brating in beautiful poems a Ruler of their city 
whose name was Love, who sent his rain and sun- 
shine on the evil and the good. There were innocent 
children passing with laughter and dance into the 
healthy vigour of maturity. Reason, Liberty, Jus- 
tice, Wealth, were there advancing, and Science was 
clearing from the sky of Faith every cloud of fear 
and superstition. 

As I pondered these reports, the purpose grew 
within me to make an excursion, at least, to that city, 
which I had left too early in life to know much of 
personally ; and so one day I went to the station 
and asked for a ticket to the City of Destruction. 



24 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Amazed at my request, the station-master informed 
me that there were no trains running that way for 
passengers, — they had only arrangements for bring- 
ing people away from that accursed place ; and he 
further advised me to be cautious lest I should be 
put under restraint as a fit subject for the lunatic 
asylum: there was a flourishing institution of that 
character in the city. 

After this I kept quiet for a time, and tried to 
be contented with my purple cloud and trumpet ; 
but in vain. I confided to my parents my desire to 
return for a time to my native place, but they wept 
at the bare mention of the project, and evidently 
feared that my wits were going. Again I waited, 
and sought to believe that it was best to remain 
where I was. At length, however, there came to 
me one who spoke with a voice not to be disobeyed. 
He laid on me a burden, and gave me a shield called 
Truth, and said : 6e Henceforth thou shalt be a pil- 
grim. From a world believing the incredible, adoring 
where it should abhor, thou shalt depart, never to 
return. Whither, shall be opened to thee as thou 
shalt journey ; whence, is already plain." 

Then I turned my face toward the old world I 
had so painfully left. As I drew near the border of 
our Prince's domain, I was met by one of his officers, 
who informed me that I should find a bad road, 
and that the country was almost impassable. " In 
building the railway by which pilgrims to the 



HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME. 25 

Celestial City now travel so comfortably/' he 
said, " all the disagreeables and dangers they once 
had to encounter have been heaped on the path you 
propose to undertake. The dirt taken from the 
tunnel of the Hill Difficulty you will now find piled 
across your road. The Slough of Despond, displaced 
on our line, has settled in the way by which you 
must go. All the sorrows and pains once besetting 
the path of Christian now waylay him who would 
fly in the face of what has become the respectable 
and popular religion." 

Nevertheless, I went on. But before I had 
reached the verge of the Prince's dominions a large 
number of his liveried servants ran after me, and 
began pelting me, crying : " Infidel ! Atheist ! 
Geologist! Pantheist! Madman!" 

Somewhat bruised, I hastened onward. Soon, 
however, there stood before me, preparing his darts, 
a monster, whom I at once recognised. " Why, 
how is this, Apollyon ?" I cried ; " when last I 
encountered you, you were trying to prevent pil- 
grims from reaching the Celestial City ; surely you 
do not oppose their return ?" " Times are changed," 
he replied ; " since the railway has been opened, I 
have been taken into the employment of the Prince 
of Otherworldliness." Thereupon he let fly his 
darts, on each of which was written its name: 
"Popularity," "Parsonage," "Patronage," "Pro- 
motion," and the like. But with the aid of my 



26 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



shield I managed to pass him; and though after- 
ward I had a dreary imprisonment in Doubting 
Castle, its lock yielded to the key of Trust, which 
some former pilgrim had dropped on the floor, and 
I arrived at last within sight of the great city. 

But it was yet very distant ; and, being weary 
after my long and toilsome journey, I ventured to 
approach a house which I saw. As I came nearer 
I perceived that it was the house of the Interpreter, 
and for some time I hesitated to go further, appre- 
hending that he too would oppose my return. Re- 
membering, however, that the obstacles to my 
leaving the Celestial City had been chiefly raised 
by those who had opposed my journey toward it, I 
hoped that the Interpreter might also have changed 
his allegiance, and I knocked at his door. My hope 
was true. He met me with a hearty welcome, and 
declared to me that the City of Destruction had 
changed its character as much as the Celestial 
City, and that he was anticipating in the future 
the same class of pilgrims returning thither as 
those who had once sought the realm of Other- 
worldliness. 

The Interpreter lit his candle and said : ' f Do 
you remember the picture I formerly showed you, 
in a private room, of a very grave person ?" " I do, 
indeed," I said ; " and this was the fashion of it : 
it had eyes lifted up to heaven, the best of books in 
its hand, the law of truth was written upon its lips, 



HOW I LEFT THE WORLD TO COME. 



27 



the world was behind its back, it stood as if it 
pleaded with men, and a crown of gold did hang 
over its head." " That picture," he said, " gradually 
became so dingy, that once, when an old artist came 
hither, I accepted his offer to clean and retouch it ; 
you shall see it as he left it." On entering the 
well-known room, I saw that the portrait had been 
changed in several particulars. The grave person's 
eyes now looked downward ; the book, partially 
closed, was placed on one side ; and the world, which 
had been behind, was now immediately under his eyes, 
and covered with inscriptions; the crown of gold 
suspended over his head had changed to luminous 
dust." When I asked the meaning of this change, 
the Interpreter said : ee I will show you a new 
scene commanded by this house, which will unfold 
the significance of the picture." Thereupon, he 
took me to the top of the house, from which could 
be seen the two rival cities. What was my sur- 
prise to see a dark cloud gathering over the City of 
Otherworldliness, with lightnings flashing from it, 
while over the so-called City of Destruction shone 
a beautiful rainbow ! " Thus," said the Interpreter, 
" that which exalteth itself must be abased, and 
that which humbleth itself shall be exalted. The 
city which, from being the domain of the lowly 
friend of man, the carpenter's son, has been given 
over to those who care more for bishoprics and 
fine livings than for mankind, has become the City 



28 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



of Destruction ; while that which has cared rather 
for man whom it can, than for God whom it cannot, 
benefit, has become the City of Humanity, which 
shall endure for ever." 

The Interpreter then said that, as there were 
unhappily few pilgrims as yet going in my direction, 
he would be able to accompany me on a part of 
the way. I was not so near, he said, as I might sup- 
pose. " That great metropolis which you see is 
not the city you seek; it is Bothworldsburg, and, 
though commercially connected with the City of 
Humanity, owns allegiance to the Prince of Other- 
worldliness, whose powerful agencies therein are 
marked by its spires. Its inhabitants pass six- 
sevenths of their time in this world, aud during the 
other seventh pray to their Prince, and protest 
loudly against taking any thought at all for this 
life. The confines of Bothworldsburg blend with 
those of the City of Humanity, which you can 
hardly trace out from here, and, indeed, may have 
some difficulty in finding. You must go through the 
tedious paths of Study, Reality, and Devotion, and 
when you arrive at the suburbs you will still have 
to be a pilgrim amid many nights and days before 
you reach the heart of the city. After arriving 
there, you will be left a good deal to your own guid- 
ance : the inhabitants are very busy ; they do not sit 
on purple clouds blowing golden trumpets. The 
only prayer to the Lord of that city is work; the only 



HOW I LEFT THE WORLD "TO COME. 29 

praise is virtue. Its treasures are not obvious, but 
in hard ores. You will find the pavements golden 
only when you can transmute them to gold ; and 
only if you have found a pearl to carry in your own 
breast will its gates become pearl." 

Thereupon we set out on our way. Bothworlds- 
burg, in which most of my wanderings occurred, so 
nearly resembled the metropolis in which these 
records and reflections are published, that I think 
it best to use its familiar names and events. This 
may be somewhat startling at first, and to some 
may seem even vulgar. But having abandoned my 
purple cloud, there is nothing better left, me, out of 
which to build my visions, than London clay ; and 
I can only regret it if its importance and capabilities 
are exaggerated by eyes which have been so long 
absorbed in otherworldly visions. At any rate, I 
can promise my reader that we shall be near that 
lowly vale where the pilgrims listened to the song 
of the shepherd's boy who (C wears more of that herb 
called heart's-ease in his bosom than he that is clad 
in silk and velvet," and where, as Mr. Bunyan states 
on good authority, pearls have been found. 



I. 



THE HABITAT OF CHRISTIANITY. 



To worship in a temple not your own is mere flattery. 

Chinese Analects. 



Your scheme must he the framework of the universe ; all other 
schemes will soon he in ruins. The perfect God, in his revelations of 
himself, has never got to the length of one such proposition as you, 
his prophets, state. Have you learned the alphabet of Heaven, and 
can count three ? Do you know the number of God's family ? Can 
you put mysteries into words ? Do you presume to fable of the in- 
effable ? 

Thoreau. 



THE HABITAT OF CHRISTIANITY. 



W 
mm 



N the city of the Prince of Other worldliness 
I had generally passed my Sundays listen- 
ing to denunciations by his divines of all 
the people and all the opinions which we had left in 
the world from which we had escaped. Abandoned 
by us, it was, of course, — or so these divines asserted, 
— abandoned by everything good. But on the first 
Sunday after I had come near the world that is, 
the Interpreter proposed that we should go to our 
devotions in a garden of wild animals. 

Do not, I pray you, reader, look upon that spot 
as too vulgar and near for the pilgrim to ask your 
company to it. Seen with eyes long accustomed to 
otherworldly sights, it is nothing less than huma; 1 . 
society in masquerade. These are the perfect shapes 
of passions ; here are the bulls and bears of the 
Exchange, the diplomatists, the aristocrats in fine 
plumage. Men will one day twine their laurels 
about the head that can set these cries and screams 

c 



34 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



to music, and interpret the thousand realms whose 
open secrets hide in these curious creatures. Every 
hair on them is a history ; a myriad suns burn in 
their eyes ; on their foreheads, as on anvils, thought 
was fashioned ; yonder beautiful woman is the sum 
of their selected shapes : out of their instincts crys- 
tallised at last the crown-jewels of Humanity, — 
Reason, Love, Worship. 

Much did I admire that in this little circuit there 
was displayed the knowledge and dexterity which 
had given to each its right environment. Here is a 
bit of Arctic, there of contiguous Tropic ; the fish 
finds its Southern Sea with the familiar reef, the 
wading-bird its fish-pond : all are supplied by the 
art which knows that Nature is commanded by 
obedience. 

" How faithfully/' said the Interpreter, " is each 
animal here inscribed with the liberties and limita- 
tions of its habitation ! These long bare legs and 
long neck and bill mean a subsistence by fishing in 
shallow water; those powerful wings and talons 
imply heavy prey borne to the mountain-top. Every 
sharp eye, or velvet foot, or thick neck, assigns a 
freedom and outlines a prison. Death awaits the 
most powerful beyond its habitat. 

" Are the laws governing man an d n j s institu- 
te o 

tions less inexorable? Absolutism has disappeared 
from this country for the same reason that bears have. 
So animal and human sacrifices have disappeared 



THE HABITAT: OF CHRISTIANITY. 



35' 



because the religious habitat they once found here 
has been destroyed. A tropical bird might be mis- 
guided enough to find its way into Windsor Forest 
some day. Taylor, the Platonic enthusiast, once 
sacrificed a bull to Zeus in his back parlour. The 
bird must flutter into some warm room or perish; 
and the practical worshipper of Zeus must obey his 
landlady's summons to the police-court. 

" Let us imagine, for a moment, an England 
which has never heard of the Bible or of Christianity. 
A traveller comes from some foreign land, and 
describes the religious beliefs of its inhabitants. 
He represents them as maintaining that many 
centuries ago Almighty God came down out of 
heaven and was born as a human infant; that the 
reason for his doing so was that the human race 
had sprung from a man and a woman who, by eating 
an apple he had forbidden them to eat, had brought 
down a curse upon the whole world, under which 
every human being is, to the end of time 5 born 
utterly depraved, and, unless his or her nature 
be miraculously changed, must burn in everlasting 
fire after death. The Creator, unable to mitigate 
this penalty accruing to mankind for the misdeed of 
their first parents, was nevertheless moved with pity 
for humanity thus going on to endless torments, and 
conceived a scheme for saving them. That scheme 
was to be himself born on earth, a member of the 
accursed human family ; to prove himself to be God 



36 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



by working wonders which no mortal could work ; 
to take upon himself the sins and curse of the earth 
and of all its inhabitants ; to suffer himself all the 
pains and penalties which had awaited the whole race 
of men; and, having thus satisfied the unalterable 
law, to offer mankind, as the conditions of their salva- 
tion, that each one who should by faith in this plan 
believe that his sins, which deserved eternal torture 
by fire, had been already suffered for, — who should 
pray to have the divine suffering vicariously imputed 
to his particular case, and also glorify God suffi- 
ciently for so acting, — should be granted a free par- 
don for the ancestral sin ; while all those who should 
not personally fulfil these conditions should proceed, 
as before, into eternal misery, as the just punishment 
for the eating of the forbidden apple by the first 
human pair, whatever might be their own moral 
character. 

" What would be the comments of the supposed 
unchristianised England upon such a narrative as 
this ? and what would be its inferences concerning 
the government, customs, and physical features of 
the country in which such a religion prevailed? 
Not in a fruitful and pleasant land, we should say, 
could such beliefs spring up, but amid rock and 
desert, where Nature seemed resting under a curse. 
It is the faith, we should say, of a people who regard 
all human suffering, disease, and death as evidences 
of divine anger ; who, being without science, regard 



THE HABITAT OF CHRISTIANITY. 



37 



all unusual phenomena as expressions of an arbitrary 
power, and would thus look for miracles to attend 
any revelation from their deity. They would conceive 
of the deity as like unto themselves, — likely, there- 
fore, to be born of a woman. They must imagine 
their god something like their barbaric king, whose 
mere word were law, disobedience to which, because 
of his grandeur, would make a heinous crime out of 
a peccadillo, such as the eating of a prohibited apple. 
They would believe in certain infernal powers whose 
business it is to keep a furnace of fire always burning 
for the punishment of offenders against the majesty 
of this more powerful king ; which would also sug- 
gest that this tribe dwelt in a disagreeably hot 
climate. They would believe that their deity, like 
their monarch, could only be approached on bended 
knees, and that he is fond of flattery and glorifica- 
tion. It would be no anomaly in their government 
that one man should be punished for the crime of 
another. 

" But what should we say — assuming as yet that 
there is no authority for the creed described — did 
we learn that the people who built great temples 
and maintained a vast priesthood in devotion to 
those beliefs were dwelling in a country and amid 
general ideas and customs just the reverse of those 
inferred ? — that they inhabited a green and beautiful 
land, while believing all Nature to be under the 
blighting curse of God ; that when ill they call in a 



33 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



physician, though believing disease and death to be 
visitations of the divine will; that they will im- 
prison as an impostor one who professes to work 
miracles, and would not permit the testimony to a 
miracle of a thousand witnesses to determine the 
distribution of an estate, while they maintain that 
one in the form of man did, within historic times, 
repeatedly raise the dead to life and violate the 
order of Nature; that they would unseat a judge 
who should order the death-penalty for the worst 
theft, while worshipping a God who punishes millions 
with eternal tortures for an apple eaten thousands 
of years before they were born ; that, with courts 
of law in which no man can be prosecuted for the 
sin of another, they believe that all men merit, and 
many receive, endless agonies at the hands of Grod 
for an offence they never committed, and that the 
only exculpation for any is derived from the tor- 
tures of an innocent person in their place ; that they 
would despise an earthly sovereign who should be 
fond of adulation, and would regard the glorification 
of such an one to obtain favours as disgusting syco- 
phancy, while they believe that their Grod can be 
pacified and coaxed by such appeals to his vanity, 
and teach every child that the chief end of man is 
to glorify Grod and enjoy him for ever; that, with a 
language which calls various crimes inhuman, un- 
natural, unmanly, they proclaim their belief that 
humanity is desperately wicked, and the natural 



THE HABITAT OF CHRISTIANITY. 



39 



man a child of the devil ; that, while thus believing 
human nature totally depraved, their politicians 
seek popular favour by promising to do right instead 
of wrong, and their tradesmen trust daily to the 
common integrity; and, lastly, that these people, 
believing that millions of those around them — in- 
cluding some of their own children, relatives, and 
friends — are in imminent danger of suffering all 
the intensified agonies that the wrath of God can 
inflict, and that vast numbers are now so suffering, 
or doomed to suffer, do nevertheless go quietly 
about their business, enjoy themselves in society, 
and in every way act as if all were going on plea- 
santly. 

" This people, we should say, have somehow got 
dressed in a religion that does not belong to them, — 
a borrowed religion, transferred from some desolate 
land and barbarian age, which, contradicted as it is 
point for point by its whole environment, is essen- 
tially incredible to those professing it, — a creed 
which could exist amid such conditions only as 
the fauna or flora of the Tropics can exist in 
an English park, that is, by the help of an artificial 
habitat." 

When we left the garden, a messenger came to 
the Interpreter to inform him that a number of pil- 
grims from the City of Otherworldliness had been 
seen in the distance, and so he had to hasten home 
to receive them. Nevertheless, before leaving me, 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



he gave rne a number of letters of introduction to 
friends of his in the city, and a good chart and guide- 
book, so that with these, and his well-remembered 
instructions, I have felt that he was with me in 
spirit on my yet unended pilgrimage. 




II. 



THE CHURCH AUCTION. 



They sold the favour of the Prince to the Vizier, and the Vizier 
sold the Empire. They sold the law to the Cadi, and the Cadi sold 
Justice. They sold the altar to the Priest, and the Priest sold 
Heaven. 

Volney. 



Tell me, ye pilgrims, who so thoughtful go, 

Musing, perhaps, on objects far away, 

Come ye from wandering in such distant land 

(As by your looks and garb we must infer), 

That you our city traverse in her woe, 

And mingle with her crowds, yet tears withhold, 

Like persons quite unconscious of her state ? 

Dante. 



THE CHURCH AUCTION. 



WENT to seek an auction-room, where, I 
had heard, some Cures of Souls were to be 
sold. The company was thin, and evi- 
dently had misgivings about the property. A 
• Jew bid for one of the livings, but the smile that 
faintly showed itself on the faces present — caused 
possibly by the oddity of a Catholic duke selling a 
Christian Cure of Souls to a Jew— caused him to 
withdraw. The auctioneer could hardly have had 
much of that kind of property to dispose of, and 
perhaps he just a little overpassed the bounds of the 
sentiment around him when he accompanied his 
graphic picture of a parsonage and its lawns with 
hopeful suggestions that the aged clergyman, then 
in occupation, would soon be evicted by the sum- 
mons to another world. It became, indeed, plain 
that the auctioneer was a bungler for this once, at 
least, and he did not succeed in selling, if I remem- 
ber rightly, one of the livings. 




44 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



At length the bidders fell away one by one, and 
the auctioneer departed. I lingered at the door, 
looking out on some persons who were carrying 
holly to the market, for Christmas was near, and 
upon some children, who had already managed to 
coax a few premature smiles out of Santa- Claus. 
Turning around I found that a singular company 
had entered the room, and the auction was about to 
recommence. But this time it was a new auctioneer 
who had the matter in hand, — a shadowy individual, 
with piercing eye and a low voice, — a voice, how- 
ever, insinuating; and cunning enough. It was 
waxing toward the twilight of a foggy day, and 
the auctioneer seemed almost a phantom speak- 
ing to phantoms. Amid occasional murmurs, and 
with some pauses, he spoke somewhat after this 
wise : 

" Gentlemen, the auctioneer who has just gone 
did not half know his business, or else he little 
comprehended the nature of the property he offered 
you. I take his place, and would remind you that 
this is no common lot. These churches have cost a 
great deal. Their founder had to be nailed on a cross 
that they might be built. Their walls are cemented 
with the blood of faithful hearts, the blood of con- 
fessors and martyrs. Thousands perished to put 
them in the state of repair in which I olfer them 
to you. They are consecrated by centuries of sor- 
row and sacrifice ; in them souls have inly burned 



THE CHURCH AUCTION. 



45 



with the flame of devotion, stricken hearts raised 
their supplications to One who alone could fathom 
their needs ; souls have brought to those altars their 
burdens of sin and sorrow, and earnest minds aspired 
there to know the mysteries of life and death. Their 
bells have rung in merrily the happy and sad years 
of wedlock, and again have tolled above the sobs of 
mourners. Their spires have pointed grief and 
poverty from earthly struggle to eternal peace. All 
these have gone to swell the market value of the 
five Cures of Souls which the light of the blessed 
Reformation and the grace of the Duke of Norfolk 
enable me to offer you this day. 

" What ! does no one bid yet ? Did I hear some 
one muttering about money-changers scourged from 
the temple, or another call it outrageous that the 
Cures of Souls should be put up at auction ? Gen- 
tlemen, we are not children ; let us not refer to the 
childhood of the world for our precedents. We 
belong to a National Church which represents the 
apotheosis of decency. A whip of small cords, even 
for those who make the house of God a den of 
thieves, were vulgar and fanatical in these days. 
Above all, let us have no mawkish or hypocritical 
sentimentalism here. We are Englishmen, who 
know the pearl of price to be a pound sterling, and 
we pray that our Queen may live long in health 
and wealth. As for this church auction, permit me 
to remind you that it is no novel thing. The Chris- 



46 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



tian Church of old was no sooner built, and the 
miserable scaffold at its base, on which its founder 
perished like a slave, raised to shine on its towers 
as the symbol of honour, than the imperial pre- 
decessors of his Grace our Duke put it up at 
auction. Truth bid for it; Justice, Humanity, 
Holiness did the same ; but Royalty and Supersti- 
tion joined their purses and outbid the others. They 
have owned and conducted it to this day. Through 
them it is that the worshippers in it sit on cushions 
instead of on the cold hill-side. It is due to them 
that the successors of wretched fishermen, following 
one who had not where to lay his head, do now get 
fine episcopal salaries and palaces. 

" Gentlemen, it is a commercial age. Every- 
thing is in the market. What will you have ? quoth 
God ; j)ay for it and take it. Observe those saw- 
grinders at Sheffield ; their work demands that each 
shall live but half of his appointed years, and that 
the half he does live shall be passed in a dark and 
dismal Hades, bound, Ixion-like, around the grind- 
ing; wheel. What wondrous muscles and sinews are 
there ! All the skill of the world could not make 
the least vein in him, or a drop of the red stream 
that courses through it. Myriads of ages contri- 
buted to give that flash to his eye ; and every divine 
element of the Universe to organise that incompre- 
hensible brain that thinks and feels behind all. 
What are these fine churches compared with that 



THE CHURCH AUCTION. 



47 



temple framed by God for his own abode, which 
without scandal is bought every hour by worshipful 
Cutlers and Colliers, and other Masters? Who 
that has a mother, or sister, or daughter need be 
reminded of the sacred and tender emotions that 
cluster about the heart of woman? But pass through 
the Haymarket, or — the distance is but little — hover 
with the crowd about the doors of the fashionable 
church where the millionaire buys his young bride, 
and tell me if womanhood is not in the market. 

" Nay, gentlemen, repair to the pulpits them- 
selves ; is not every prayer, every sermon, bought 
and paid for? There is, indeed, an old story that 
the world once offered all its kingdoms if the 
founder of Christianity would only modify his ideas 
of worship, and that he refused ; but we must await 
the results of modern criticism before crediting such 
preternatural narratives as that. At any rate, we 
have England to deal with, not ancient Judea, 
where, it has been truly said, " they didn't know 
everything." Does any man here believe that the 
thirteen hundred livings in the hands of the House 
of Lords, or the livings, representing an annual 
income of two millions sterling, subject to private 
patronage, are mainly disposed of to the humblest 
and devoutest clergymen, without reference to any 
earthly or political considerations? If so, let him 
move a return of the number of Liberal clergymen 
enjoying livings owned by Conservative landlords. 



4 8 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Let him explain why the clergy resist Irish dis- 
establishment in a phalanx almost as solid as that 
with which the Dissenters, reading the same Bible 
and worshipping the same Christ, advocate it, if 
he would show the Church pulpits unpurchasable 
by any interest. But I need not confine my state- 
ment to any one Church. Look abroad through 
Christendom, and decide whether the scholarship, 
the ability, the ingenuity, and the eloquence, which 
still maintain its dogmas, are not retained by fees. 
Does that learned Oxonian believe that the world 
was made in six days ? Does he believe that on the 
seventh day God rested, and was refreshed after 
the fatigue of creation ? Does he believe Athana- 
sius, when he says Christ is Almighty God, rather 
than Jesus, when he says, ( My Father is greater 
than I and does he believe that all who ad- 
here to the latter belief shall without doubt 
perish everlastingly? Does he believe that God 
has prepared everlasting fires, that he sends mil- 
lions into the world knowing that they will even- 
tually burn in the same, and that among those 
who will suffer that vengeance are all disbeliev- 
ers of the orthodox creed? Does he believe that 
Newton, Hume, Channing, Franklin, Schiller, 
Goethe, Comte, Mill, Carlyle, Emerson, Mazzini, 
Garibaldi, are all destined to be damned, and that 
the generation they have been somehow empowered 
to train is to follow them to perdition? Does he 



THE CHURCH AUCTION. 



49 



believe that God has assigned as the one Plan of 
Salvation a scheme which the majority of the best 
brains constructed by himself find utterly incredible, 
— a scheme which the chief men of Science find 
contradicted by every fact of nature, and the jurors 
of Philosophy find revolting to reason? If the 
scholarly graduate does not believe this, why does he 
preach it? Has he not been knocked down at the 
bid of some grand Abbey, or Chapel, or Cathedral ? 
Has he said, c Get thee behind me,' to Promotion ? 
What has poor undowered Heresy to offer the young 
minister? Who shall look for the scholarly divine 
to utter the talismanic word in his heart, when he 
knows that at that moment the walls around him 
must crumble, and he be left to take his chance 
with the hunted foxes, but without even their cer- 
tainty as to holes ? 

" Some foolish people, gentlemen, had fancied 
there was one wing of the clergy about to with- 
draw itself from the market. I say foolish, because 
such an exceptional course could be pursued by no 
aggregate interest; not because there are not eccen- 
tric religionists who are now and then unwilling to 
exchange their convictions for the whole world. 
The particular clerical body to which I allude is 
constituted of those called Ritualists. These men 
had been showing such a restless and reckless an- 
tipathy to our most valuable religious standards 
that, albeit they had not much sense, some seemed 

D 



50 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 

to think they could not be bought up by the Estab- 
lishment. They stood between their altar and 
the court of law. On the altar was throned 
Almighty God, claiming, in their belief, certain 
definite obeisances; on the bench sat an English- 
man authorised to continue to them the advantages 
and properties of the Establishment on condition 
that such obeisances should be withheld. As many 
genuflections as you please, gentlemen, as many 
altar-lights for God as you desire, only you must 
go out of our Church with them, as your Master 
went out of the Synagogue ! A plain choice was 
here to be made between God and man. The result 
was never doubtful. The Ritualists would like to 
be on the side of God; they must be on that of the 
Property. 

" Consider these things, I pray you, gentlemen, 
and confess that it is but a straining at gnats to 
object to the selling at auction of the five churches, 
which I now again offer to the highest bidder, — 
saint or sinner, — without condition, save that no 
nonconformist shall preach in any one of them, be 
he the angel Gabriel. Set in them clergymen who 
shall teach men how to invest successfully in hea- 
venly scrip. Let the children learn, as they did at 
the Big Tabernacle, that fleeing to J esus means tea 
and cake at a distinguished brother's house, and 
limitless measures of the same hereafter. Let young 
and old there study the law and the profits. How 



THE CHURCH AUCTION. 



5i 



much was the popularity of Christ's name increased 
in mediaeval Europe after it was stamped on a gold 
coin, and his leadership (dacatus) meant a ducat ! 
And is not the name of God on our own coins? 
Wherever our race goes, this sanctity of the pro- 
fitable thing appears — as, across the ocean, in the 
Almighty Dollar. Other races may be proverbially 
f gay,' e romantic,' e theoretical :' we are shopkeep- 
ing; and in the sacred name of British Trade I 
offer you these Cures of Souls. Who bids ? 
" Going — going — gone !" 



III. 



ST. ALBAN'S. 



Ive Loo asked about serving the spirits of the dead. The Master 
said, " While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their 
spirits ? " 

Ke Loo added, " I venture to ask about death." He was an- 
swered, " While you do not know life, how can you know about 

death ?" 

Chinese Classics. 

They say, through patience, chalk 
Becomes a ruby stone ; 
Ah, yes ! but by the true heart's blood 
The chalk is crimson grown. 

Hafiz (Emerson's tr.). 



ST. ALBAN'S. 




HE reference to the Ritualists in the auc- 
tioneer's harangue made me determine 
to visit St. Alban's Church. I have 
always had a little niche in my heart for the 
proto-martyr of Britain. As saints go, he was, 
perhaps, the most honest we have ever had in this 
region. He had none of that pious ingenuity 
which, at Rome, could convert a statue of Jupiter 
into Peter with his keys. He said plainly to the 
barbarians, " These deities to whom you offer sacri- 
fices are not deities, but devils ; and he that offers 
prayers or sacrifices to them, so far from securing the 
objects of his desire, w T ill have everlasting tortures 
in hell for his reward." The deities thus blasphemed 
were not accustomed to postpone their retaliations 
to a future world, as poor Alban soon had reason to 
know. The clergyman and worshippers at the 
London church named after him were, about the 
time of my going there, giving some indications that 
they would prove equally uncompromising with 



56 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Alban toward their opponents. That, at least, would 
be a sign of life, and therefore hopeful. 

I went early enough to see them lighting their 
candles, and could not help thinking of the foolish 
virgins trimming their lamps. Give us, 0 buried 
Ages, of your oil, for our lamps of the Present have 
gone out ! Yet there was a singular archaeological 
interest about the scene. The legend of the Romans 
and Huns, above whose slain hosts two spectral 
armies arose to continue the battle in the air, seemed 
realised in the ritualistic controversy. These vest- 
ments and candles were the ghosts of ancient ban- 
ners and war-fires, once the insignia of real religions. 
Would that one could add just enough to the fore- 
head of yonder strong-headed priest to enable him 
to trace to their sources the candles on his altar! — 
gathered there, as he might be amazed to find, from 
the torches of Isis, Demeter, Ceres, from the She- 
chinah of Israel, from the altars of Sun-worship, 
from the Baal-fires, or Bel-fires, and Bon-fires, 
which still light up certain dark corners of Europe 
where paganism managed to linger longer than else- 
where : for the pagans (pagani, rustics ; or heathen, 
dwellers on the heath) hold on to old religions which 
have been trampled out in the cities. 

A poet looked while the sun shone upon a sod, 
and a flower answered. A poem flowered in his 
mind at the same moment. It was the face of a 
goddess smiling from the earth in those tinted petals, 



ST. ALBANY. 



57 



who should be named Demeter. By Zeus, the Sky, 
she has conceived, and the floral offspring he will 
name Persephone. But now Winter comes — 
Pluto, the god of Hades, he shall be called — and 
snatches the flower away. Demeter, mourning her 
lost child, searches through the earth, attended by 
sunbeams for torches, and finds Persephone at last 
(a seed) in the Underworld. The sunbeams assure 
the partial victory of Demeter : they lead the flower 
to upper light and air again ; but on condition that she 
shall pass one-third of the year (winter) with Pluto. 
This was the simple allegory dramatised in the 
Mysteries of Eleusis, revived in Borne in the myth of 
Ceres and Proserpine. It fell upon the stony ground 
of literalism in unimaginative Borne, and the com- 
mon people worship Ceres as the supreme power 
over the fruitfulness of land and cattle, and even of 
mothers. The temple raised to conciliate her in 
time of famine at Borne becomes the temple of the 
farming and labouring classes : hence, presently, of 
political importance. In it the decrees of the Senate 
must be inspected by the tribunes of the people. 
Allied thus with the Democracy which is to sway 
Europe, Ceres gained a kind of immortality. Europa 
herself, after whom the continent was named, was 
probably a modification of the same goddess; and 
we call our grains cereals after Ceres. It is not 
wonderful that the despised Christians were glad to 
ally themselves with this religion of the people, 



5§ 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



nor that the two should be jumbled in the brain 
of Constantine, — who was wont to consult pagan 
oracles as to how he should propagate Christianity, 
— and should through him pass together to mould 
Western Christianity. 

Thus it happens that, as Constantine had " Soli 
Invicto " on his coins, while the cross was on his 
banners, the priest here in St. Alban's, bowing before 
a cross, says, " Light of lights." From Eleusis, 
not from the Bible, he recites, " He descended into 
hell." Then he goes on with his brief discourse to 
declare his altar a real altar, with God actually and 
supernaturally present upon it. This is the immor- 
tality which Ceres has obtained. The story should 
have been told of her, rather than of Tithonos, that 
the granted petition for immortality was followed 
by such decrepitude that the recipient was glad 
to be transformed to a grasshopper. To this 
miserable form has the beautiful myth of Egypt, 
Greece, and Rome shrunk, as observable at St. 
Alban's. 

Nevertheless, there was a certain fervour about 
the sermon that set me asking whether Ritualism 
itself may not be, in a certain way, a Proser- 
pine lost in Hades, a seed for which sunbeams are 
searching? Hides there not a germ of life in 
this doctrine of the (i real presence," little suspected 
by this devout somnambulist? At least he does 
not hold that God wrought in the earth eighteen 



ST. ALBANY. 



59 



centuries ago as he no longer does, or that his won- 
ders were limited to Palestine. It is sad to see 
galaxies shrunken to St. Alban's candles, and Na- 
ture under a paten, and the long line of Seers 
and Prophets ending in this poupee in painted 
clothes. It is not delightful to witness a marionnette 
performance of the sacred drama of the Universe. 
Yet at each moment, and with each phrase, the 
Ritualist was groping with bandaged eyes near the 
holiest truths. As one sees in caverns quaint repe- 
titions of the forms of Nature, even to star-chambers 
or mimic firmaments, so does one find in the under- 
ground foliations of St. Alban's a mystical imitation 
of the upper-world growths of the human heart, 
and even of the vault of Reason. May we not 
hope that, as the law has come in to spoil these 
miserable vestments and dwarfed symbols, the 
Ritualists may be driven to some point where a 
gleam of the Day may reveal to them that it is a 
cellar they have mistaken for a saloon ? Indignant, 
oppressed, their dry breasts heated once more with 
the feeling that they are no longer free, — still better, 
their minds forced once again to do duty in con- 
sidering their position in England, and their con- 
sciences roused to question whether every hour they 
are not accepting the thirty pieces of the Estab- 
lishment for the betrayal of their Lord, — there 
may yet come a time when some strong human spirit 
shall enter here with wand of light, to touch this 



6o 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



altar till it expand again to the green earth, and 
transform these candles into lamps of Science, 
Liberty, Art, — into the beams which search all sods 
where thoughts are repressed, and into constella- 
tions above, chanting to holier fires within that Real 
Presence which fills and thrills the Universe. 



IV. 



AN OLD SHRINE. 



Dushmanta. Where is the holy retreat of Maricha ? 

Matali. A little beyond that grove, where you see a pious Yogi, 
motionless as a pollard, holding his thick bushy hair, and fixing his 
eyes on the solar orb. Mark ; his body is half covered with a white 
ant's edifice made of raised clay ; the skin of a snake supplies the 
place of his sacerdotal thread, and part of it girds his loins ; a number 
of knotty plants encircle and wound his neck ; and surrounding 
birds' nests almost conceal his shoulders, 

Dushmanta. I see with equal amazement both the pious and their 
awful retreat. It becomes, indeed, pure spirits to feed on balmy air 
in a forest blooming with trees of life. 

Sacoxtala. 





AN OLD SHRINE. 

HE sun shone fair on old Canterbury on 
the day when the new Archbishop was to 
be consecrated ; and on that morning I 
made my way to the little church of St. Martin, on 
the hill near the city. Thence I gazed over the ruin 
of the old Christian church, which was built on the 
preceding ruin of an ancient British temple, until 
my eye was fixed on the stately Cathedral. Time 
gradually drew its perspective about those towers, 
and they stood as Hercules' Pillars at the end of a 
voyage of twelve centuries. But not even time 
can measure the vast distance between little St. 
Martin's here and the Cathedral there. Through 
what ages of sunshine and frost, by what waterings 
with tears and blood, did this small brown seed which 
Ethelbert permitted to be planted in his kingdom 
expand to that great flower ! 

On this hill it was that Augustin the monk 
stood, meditating on the fate of the uncompromising 
Alban, his predecessor, — a fate for which he had 



6 4 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



no taste whatever. As he gazed on the old capital 
of the nation he had been sent to convert, a spirit 
hovered near him, and said, " All these will I give 
thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me ! " 
Augustin cried, " Gret thee beh— But stay ; who 
art thou ? " "I am the chief deity worshipped by 
this people. Make me thy enemy, and thou shalt 
share the fate of Alban ; make me thy friend, and 
instead of this little hut, where the king permits 
thee to worship thy saints, thou shalt have over 
there a palace, and a gorgeous Cathedral, with a 
throne from which thou and thy successors shall 
rule England." i( Let us compromise," replied 
Augustin. " I cannot exactly and by name worship 
thee and thy fellow-deities, but I will respect thy 
insignia and thy sacred days. My churches shall 
be twined with holly; they shall be built beside 
thy sacred wells, and near the holy oaks. Thy 
miracles and those of our saints will blend very 
naturally. In short, if thou and thy gods will only 
consent to be christened into new names, the change 
need be only so much as can be effected by a handful 
of water." The contract was signed, and Augustin 
had his throne and his Cathedral. Insignificant St. 
Martin's will not do for a Christ allied to Royalty. 

Since then the glacial centuries have moved 
on, each scratching a sign of its march on some 
stone of the building yonder. 

The most notable spot in the Cathedral, to my 



AN OLD SHRINE. 



65 



mind, was one of which no one has been able to 
give any account. Canterbury was the place of 
splendid shrines, and religious history is full of the 
accounts of pilgrimages to them from all parts of 
the world. Of these, the most distinguished was 
that of St. Thomas a Becket, a mass of gold and 
gems. The great historic shrines have all their 
original positions well known, and in front of some 
of them are the marks of pilgrims' knees. But 
about none of these great shrines are such evidences 
of popular devotion as about the mysterious spot on 
one side, of which there is no history or trace 
except the pavement which pilgrims' knees have 
worn into hollows. Who was this Unknown 
God? Had it been found necessary to invest a 
Christian Saint with the sanctity of some image 
of the native religion? Had Ethelbert's Queen, 
now St. Bertha, been costumed as a Madonna, 
because she bore the holiest name of the Saxon 
Mythology ? 

Much applause has been awarded Gregory and 
Augustin for their method of borrowing: for their 
Church the glories of paganism. It is claimed to 
be highly philosophical to recognise the unities 
underlying various religions. But there is a differ- 
ence between Philosophy and Jesuitism. Alban 
honestly saying — what Augustin believes as well — 
that the heathen deities are devils, is a nobler figure 
than the Jesuit in America commending Jesus to 

E 



66 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



the savages as a chief who scalped one thousand of 
his enemies in a single day. 

If there were anything needed to make Augustin 
uglier in the matter, it is that he hardly fulfilled 
the conditions under which he secured the union of 
Church and State. Once on his throne, he seems to 
have overruled the popular worship as vigorously as 
he could, short of incurring any peril for himself 
like that which overtook Alban. Canterbury 
Cathedral, as established by him, must be looked 
upon as the first Conservatory built to secure for 
Christianity a habitat in the North, where no unim ■ 
ported element was friendly to it. Those who occu- 
pied his throne after he was dead did not regard it 
as necessary to be bound by his shrewd contract 
with the existing deities. Some bits of the famous 
old windows and carvings still remain to show with 
what beauty the Church saints looked down upon 
the people ; but in the crypt — copied, perhaps, from 
the walls of older periods — the grinning and de- 
formed figures are still to be seen, each, probably, 
the representative to the newer pagan generation 
of some o-od of their forefathers. And this contrast 
between the saintly faces and the horrible besti- 
alities physiognomically represents the difference 
between the condition of their respective adherents. 
Thenceforth, for the believer all that is good, for 
the heretic all that is bad. The land is divided 
among those who conform most aggressively, and 



AN OLD SHRINE. 



67 



they who conform not shall wear the bronze collars 
of the others. The succeeding generations can be 
more easily dealt with ; for the priestly horror of 
any education but that which trains the neck for 
the priestly yoke was already in full vigour, and 
the very cradle-sides were made to teach that ever- 
lasting tortures by fire awaited all who should doubt 
or deny ; these lessons being also continually im- 
pressed by a practical anticipation of such fires for 
notorious heretics. On the other hand, for the 
implicit belief, Heaven, — its radiance reflected in 
the palaces and cathedrals it was competent to be- 
stow in advance upon favourites. Poor Odin and 
Thor, now sadly out at elbows, were fairly put to 
shame. For that matter, they might, indeed, have 
claimed brotherhood with him in whose name they 
were exterminated ; but it was by no means a 
peasant befriending his fellow-peasants, at the cost 
of crucifixion, who was talked of in England in 
those days, but a triumphant Prince, whose celestial 
glory and power over quick and dead gleamed upon 
the earth in the pomp of kings and in the swords 
and splendours of Crusaders, Templars, Hospitallers, 
and what not. who bore his banner through the 
world. 

Such was Conservatory Number One. It was 
strongly built. The shrine, now nameless, which 
had proved such a powerful rival to those of im- 
ported saints, was removed. But a day came when 



68 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



the wind and weather beat in upon those of a 
Becket, of Dunstan, and the rest, and they too 
mouldered away. There is hardly any roof lower 
than the blue dome through which the elements 
will not find their way. An honest monk spake in 
Germany, and the golden shrines of Canterbury 
turned to ashes. The honest monk shuddered at 
what he had done, and was presently ready to join 
those who would rebuild the Conservatory anew; 
but his mistake was in thinking it was his work. 
He merely summed up and named the composite 
work of a thousand years, in Avhich German thought 
and Saxon honesty had honeycombed quite silently 
the Augustinian fabric. All the kings and priests, 
their horses and men, could not undo the work that 
had been done. 

Things must undergo many repairs in order to 
last, and with every repair something must perish. 
After looking at the grotesque images carved on 
capitals in the crypt, and concluding that their ori- 
ginals were Christian caricatures of pagan deities, I 
passed a little way on, and saw much refuse, made 
by the workmen then engaged in repairing the 
building. The heaps presented an odd jumble. At 
one spot there were old pulpits, and old seats, and 
benches for kneeling. Who had spoken from the 
pulpits, and who had knelt ? Had one set of dogmas 
been uttered and heard, or had each successive pul- 
pit known some " wing," — in its time high, hard, 



AN OLD SHRINE. 



69 



or broad? One might suppose the figures of the 
pillars to be grinning their delight on the heaps of 
rubbish on another side. Many poor saints, in 
whose interest they had been caricatured, were 
here piled in fragments, awaiting transfer to some 
dust-hole. The sandalled feet of one propped the 
nose and eyes of another ; armless hands completed 
footless legs ; and mitres, sceptres, cowls, crowns, 
swords had tumbled into a common confusion. Dust 
to dust ! They were the pillars of the first Con- 
servatory, the decorations of the second. What 
fragments a century of revolutions had spared, time 
had at length pulverised, and they must go to rest 
upon the dust of the gods they superseded, slowly 
forming the rock on which the next higher temple 
shall be built. 

For there was a Conservatory Number Two to 
be built for the exotic, which the toil of centuries 
had not been able to acclimatise. The materials of 
the old one cpuld plainly not be used, save, as we 
have seen, for ornamental purposes, — as the castel- 
lated turrets, which once meant utility, still decorate 
mansions raised in an age of peace, or we follow as 
sports the serious occupations of savage life. The 
old weapons of the Church have been broken. 
Earthly government has found it necessary to miti- 
gate some of the rigours of divine law. Hell-fires 
can no more be anticipated at Smithfield, nor the 
earthly heaven be secured to believers so absolutely 



7o 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



as. before. Nevertheless, there remains the power 
to urge all the more the terrors and rewards of the 
future, and — for these must grow weak — Society 
may still wield its ostracisms and distribute its ad- 
vantages for the coercion of opinion. The Thirty - 
nine Articles shall mean many things, but one thing; 
definitely shall they mean: thirty-nine pieces of 
money to him who shall betray Reason for them. To 
them shall be given the Keys of Knowledge, and 
only he shall enter the University who will lay 
down his independence at the threshold. Every 
heretic shall see the difference between his own and 
his orthodox neighbour's coffers. As for the clever 
young scholars, if they become restless under the 
task of believing the incredible, there shall be pro- 
vided the chloroform of promotion and luxury, 
under which surgeries can be easily performed on 
the mind. Has any young theologian a tendency to 
doubt, or to write radical books? Make him a 
Head Master, a Canon, a Dean, a Professor, or a 
Bishop. 

Thus it came to pass that, on the fourth day of 
February, 1869, a great crowd of cultivated people 
sat together in Canterbury Cathedral — Conserva- 
tory Number Two of the Incredible Creed — to 
witness the consecration of a plain old Scotch gen- 
tleman to the task of presiding over the work of 
maintaining in Great Britain the worship of a dead 
Jew. 



AN OLD SHRINE. 



7 1 



Before the white Gothic throne — the ancient one 
from which Au°;ustm ruled within sight — I sat 
waiting. A buzz of gay conversation filled the 
building. Each clergyman who entered was dis- 
cussed; the poor clergymen in seedy coats, their 
wives in old-fashioned bonnets, were greeted with 
titters. Bonnets, in proportion to their antiquity, 
retain their ancient power to render their wearers 
invisible to many. Some of these country faces 
were fresh as roses climbing on cottage-doors ; 
about others hovered the faces of children whose 
love they had gained ; now and then some appeared 
on which were reflected the sad smiles of invalids 
over whom they had bent. There were signs that 
these and their husbands — they of the seedy coats 
— came from regions where the ministry of Christ 
still retains a meaning. These had not come for a 
pic-nic, like those whose mirth they excited. 

Gradually all became still ; the solemnity of the 
occasion wrought its effect, and we returned to our 
thoughts. An old window, refashioned out of the 
fragments of some older one, attracted my attention. 
It may have been that which is the last memorial 
of a Becket in the Cathedral. If so, he is in a 
very chaotic condition. A horse's head here, a 
human leg there, an old mitre linked on to a nose 
and chin, make a somewhat grotesque impression. 
While I was endeavouring to piece together St. 
Thomas again, the time arrived when the clergy 



72 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



should piece together all that remained of the broken 
materials that once went to the making of a real 
Archbishop of Canterbury. 

An old Gregorian chant is wafted to us from 
far away outside. A breathless stillness falls upon 
the multitude. The distant strain is very sweet; 
it may have been the very chant which Augustin 
and his monks sang as they marched from the sea- 
shore to Canterbury. At any rate, it came out of 
the sacred heart of a Past when faith was real; 
it was such music that built the walls of cathedrals, 
and its true refrain is in that music before which 
their walls are falling. 

The chanters now enter the building, where the 
organ takes up their strain, and the slow beat of the 
footsteps of the procession keeps time, — as it were, 
personating the march of centuries. The ecclesiastics 
enter, and among them the slightly bent but still 
stately old man — the centre now of all eyes — who 
is painfully going through his part. Two young 
men in full evening dress carry his train, which 
stretches some yards behind him. Could I be 
mistaken in thinking there was a shade of humilia- 
tion on his face ? 

There was something sadly unreal about the 
whole affair ; but where can the eye alight on any- 
thing in the religious world more real ? 

When the ceremony was over, I went back to 
St. Martin's. The two most eminent Deans that 



AN OLD SHRINE. 



73 



Canterbury ever knew were there. They stood 
together, gazing silently on the window stained with 
a picture of St. Martin in the act of cutting his cloak 
in two to give half of it to the naked beggar crouch- 
ing near his horse's head. 

While we were all sauntering about the diminu- 
tive building, a voice arrested our attention, A 
strange-looking man, with limp white cravat and 
threadbare coat, had got up into the little pulpit. 
His white locks fell about a face wrinkled with care, 
down upon his shoulders. His glittering eye held 
us as that of the Ancient Mariner did the Wedding 
Guest. Thus he spake : 

" St. Martin's Church faces Canterbury Cathe- 
dral. The lowliness of the one and the grandeur of 
the other do not alone mark different eras of the 
English Church ; they mark two totally distinct reli- 
gions. The one means the Saint who sacrifices his 
raiment for the needy ; the other means a Saint 
who sacrifices the needy to his raiment. What are 
our grand cathedrals, with their great revenues, but 
the rich gold-embroidered cloaks of a Jewish pea- 
sant, whose position has in England become 
princely ? 

"I am a poor country clergyman, with a large 
family, and one hundred and fifty pounds a year. 
For thirty years I have bent shivering, like the 
beggar on the window there, near the door of a 
magnificent Cathedral. Before the altar of that 



74 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Cathedral a Bishop — who has been unable to do 
any work for ten years — moulders away, awaiting 
the day when he shall be carved there in stone, 
when he will do as much good as he does now. 
Fifty people get their living out of the revenues of 
that Cathedral. They keep up a daily service for 
about twenty-five daily listeners. These attend- 
ants are from wealthy families in the neighbour- 
hood, who have nothing else to do. The com- 
mon people never go there. What can I see in that 
Cathedral but a great pile of loam in the centre of 
a barren field ? What could I not do for my own 
culture, for my own ability to serve, for the poor 
and ignorant around me, if the wealth of this useless 
heap were distributed for the religious advantage 
of the people ? As it is, what do I find under the 
shadow of those majestic towers? I will not speak 
of the daily anxiety, and the effort to make both 
ends meet; nor of a certain happy girl who has 
faded into the pale and careworn mother who toils 
and suffers at my side. But there is the need of 
servility to the wealthy, who think themselves 
St. Martins if they throw us an occasional shilling ; 
there is the parasite of ignorance creeping over my 
children's minds ; there is the subtle scepticism and 
despair deposited by each day in my own. 

" Yet a compensation has come, though late. I 
have been trained by sorrow to know that the religion 
of the Church is not the religion of him who, to those 



AN OLD SHRINE. 



75 



who cried, c Lord, Lord ! ' — but left the naked un- 
clothed and the hungry to starve, — replied, e I never 
knew you ! ' I see the saintliness of Martin well 
enough ; and I know that, were he now living and 
powerful, the sword which there passes through 
his velvet cloak would pass through and through 
every Cathedral and every big ecclesiastical salary 
in England, and the humanity of to-day would re- 
ceive that which was bequeathed to it by the 
humanity of the past. I discern, with eyes sharp- 
ened by pain, that the faith of the past built 
cathedrals and splendid shrines because they be- 
lieved them to be gateways of eternal salvation, 
and that they who now enjoy them do so without 
acknowledging the faith that built them. Is yonder 
great endowment to be administered in the letter 
or in the spirit? If in the letter, it belongs 
to the Roman Catholics ; if in the spirit, it should 
be applied to those aims and ideas which consti- 
tute the real faith of the English people. The 
bequest of the faith of one age cannot belong to 
that faith which another age has abjured. Do the 
English people believe in eternal hell-fire, in devils, 
in the potency of saints, without which no cathedral 
was ever yet built? Do pilgrims swarm along the 
Old Kent Road as in Chaucer's day ? Amid the 
conflict of sects, the surgings of scepticism, the only 
shores of belief, as solid as that on which were 
built and endowed our cathedrals, are popular 



76 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



education, freedom of thought, political liberty, 
and the rescue of the masses from pauperism, 
disease, and vice. Therefore, though to me there 
is left only a weak arm and a feeble voice, the 
last effort of both shall be made here and now. To 
the Church I bid an eternal adieu. And it is given 
me to prophesy the end for which I cannot work — 
that a Spirit is advancing, which shall send those 
idle Cathedrals to follow their master in doing good; 
which shall scatter the Archbishops' revenues and 
thrones and vestments, as King Henry scattered 
the jewels and gold of a Becket's shrine; and of all 
the grand establishments which the Universe has 
disestablished, not one stone shall be left upon 
another. The twelve centuries which to-day looked 
down from the towers of Canterbury, and saw the 
proud array of Bishops and Clergy, who leave the 
great causes and forget the heavy wrongs of the 
present to fulminate against stiff-necked Jews and 
defunct Pilates, shall be followed by an Age which 
shall look down from a loftier height upon Truth's 
golden harvests waving over the spots whereon 
they stand. All this I see, O my brothers, as this 
day I turn from the Church, with its splendid in- 
signia, and come hither to begin anew the path of 
my ministry where the Church began — with the 
Saint dividing his cloak with the beggar." 

When the old clergyman had ceased, he tottered 
and nearly fell. The two Deans, who had been 



AN OLD SHRINE. 



77 



gazing on the stained windows, sprang forward and 
bore him to their own carriage, in which he was 
driven away. 

Sometimes I have thought that this scene, and 
the strange sermon, and the aged seer himself, must 
all have been a dream ; but, again, certain burdens 
of warning that have since issued from Canterbury 
and Westminster suggest that others besides myself 
must have been impressed on that occasion. 



ISENGRIMM. 



" And now look at me," the old ruin said ; " centuries have rolled 
away, the young conqueror is decrepit now ; dying, as the old faith 
died, in the scenes where that faith first died, and lingering where 
it lingered. The same sad sweet scene is acting over again. . . . 
The village church is outliving me for a few more generations ; there 
still ring, Sunday after Sunday, its old reverend hells, and there 
come still the simple peasants in their simple dresses. . . . Yet 
is not that, too, all passing away ? . . . The fairies dance no 
more around the charmed forest ring. . . . The creed still seems 
to stand, hut the creed is dead in the thoughts of mankind." 

J. A. Froude. 

Tiger ! Tiger ! hurning bright 
In the forests of the night, 
"What immortal hand or eye 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry ? 



Did He who made the lamb make thee ? 

William Blake. 



ISENGRIMM. 



m 

mm 



N a cowled wolf, carved in the choir of an 
old church, I recognised the features of 
Isengrimm. 

Isengrimm is the suggestive name given by the 
Norse fable to the wolf in human shape whom the 
missionaries made into a monk. When, however, 
they would have him say Paternosters, all they 
could get was a pious prayer for lamb, lamb ; and 
"his thoughts were ever to the woodward." 

How Isengrimm was converted, and made monk, 
one may easily find in the Heimskringla and other 
chronicles of those ages. Olaf entering peaceful 
villages, and offerino- their inhabitants the alterna- 
tives of being burnt or baptised ; Charlemagne with 
his motto, " Christianity or death ;" Augustin, with 
Ethelbert to back him, ready to slaughter twelve hun- 
dred Welsh monks who, accepting Christ, were not 
so certain about the Pope, — such were the preachers, 
attended by divine prodigies, who persuaded Isen- 
grimm to be a monk. Did he hesitate ? — a pan of 



82 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



live coals is placed beneath his belly, and he is asked, 
" Wilt thou now believe in Christ ? " Does he 
mutter a prayer to the elements that have cradled 
his strength ? — an adder is set to crawl down his 
throat. Pondering these arguments, Tsengrimm at 
length consents to baptism, and to say Christian 
grace henceforth over his lamb. But, meanwhile, 
what are Olaf, Charlemagne, Ethelbert, and the 
rest, but baptised Isengrimms ? 

Fine enough are the reports that reach Rome. 
Miracles are wrought, the heathen converted, and 
each missionary must have his cathedral. How nu- 
merous are the converts in the Sandwich Islands 
when the anniversary of the Society for the Propa- 
gation of the Gospel in Foreign Lands is about to 
take place, and the collections to be made ! How 
wonderful have been the cures in the Hospitals for 
incurable maladies when subscription-time arrives ! 
There was a vast deal of human nature in man even 
twelve or fifteen hundred years ago. The Pope 
congratulates himself that the Angles are now 
Angels, and his priests in the North have their 
reward. 

But how to deal with Isengrimm, who, from 
beneath his cowl, begins lustily to demand his lamb 
again, and to yearn for the woods where his old 
altars stand? Neither torture nor baptism has, 
it seems, gone beyond the skin of him; nay, he 
even prowls dangerously around the cathedral doors, 



ISENGRIMM. 



Si 



and snaps up an Alban now and then. The fact is, 
he must have his lamb and his woods. So Isengrimm 
calls Odin Christ, and continues to worship him ; 
he goes to church because it is built over his long- 
time holy well, and is adorned with his holy oak ; 
and he does not relish his day of sacrifice less be- 
cause, provided he will call it Christmas, the meat 
shall be roasted instead of consumed, and be enjoyed 
by himself instead of by the gods. All this is cer- 
tainly better than being burnt himself, and is cheaply 
purchased by submission to a little holy water, — 
itself not impossibly, say the missionaries, derived 
from Mimir's Well. 

Isengrimm's nature is, in fact, part of this uni- 
verse, and it is not easy to cheat the laws that play 
through him. We see the pebble falling to the 
earth ; we do not see the earth moving in due pro- 
portion to meet the pebble. Yet move it does; and 
though ancient history reports only how the religion 
of the North was lost in Christianity, the history 
that is yet to be written will show that it conquered 
only to be conquered. " She that liveth in luxury 
is dead while she liveth." The Church filled the 
North with monasteries, universities, cathedrals ; 
but the only effective, voices obtained from them in 
the end have been those of the descendants of Isen- 
grimm, — the voices of Luther and Knox, of Goethe 
and Grimm, of Bauer and Strauss. These report 
how., his thoughts are still ever to the woodward ; 



8 4 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



and though there his old deities linger only as 
shrunken into gnomes and pixies, or the ghastly 
procession of the Wild Huntsman, or have perished 
altogether, yet they pass away only to rise again 
under the wand of Science, which is now Isen- 
grimm's religion. In the fair laws of that Nature 
which he has never ceased in his heart to adore, 
Odin and Thor, Baldur and Freyja, shine again 
from their niches, and Bertha returns to befriend 
mankind. 

Christianity fulfilled in the North the prophecy 
of the Edda : — 

Surtur from the South wends 

With seething fire ; 

The falchion of the mighty one, 

A sun-light flameth. 

Mountains together dash, 

Giants headlong rush, 

Men tread the paths to Hell, 

And Heaven in twain is rent. 

But Science shall no less surely fulfil the rest of 
the prophecy ; for, amid Surtur's conflagration, 

Lif and Lifthrasir 

Shall keep themselves hid 

In Hodmimir's forest ; 

The dew of the dawn 

Shall serve them for food, 

And from them spring the races. 

Who can mistake the tone of the authentic voices 
of Anglo-Saxon civilisation to the Theology which 



ISENGRIMM. 



85 



still stands declaring that all who do not accept it 
shall without doubt perish everlastingly ? 

" Depart! " cries the human Conscience. " Your 
creed refers to benighted eras when men believed 
that evil and sin were the mere whims of a Supreme 
Being, like the most frivolous among themselves; 
one whose mere word could make the eating of an 
apple a deadlier sin than murder : it belongs not to 
a day when the highest voice in every soul declares 
the eternal laws, which God himself dare not 
violate." 

" Depart ! " cries Common Sense. " Your mira- 
cles and legends belong to an age when men could 
not see a lunatic without fancying a devil was in 
him, or a meteor without believing it the arrow of 
a god : it has no part or lot in a generation to which 
sciences are revealing the laws of cause and effect." 

" Depart ! " cry the Senses. " Your story of a 
blighted and ruined world may do for Syrian deserts, 
or for monks and nuns who have buried themselves 
in unillumined cloisters ; but on the green slopes of 
Western Europe, and amid its cheerful populations, 
every flower, every singing bird, proves it a prodigy 
of falsehood ; and every happy home, with its loving 
mother and bright-eyed child, every honest man, is 
a contradiction to your wild superstition of the fall 
and the depravity of human nature." 

" Depart ! " cries the Democracy of the West. 
" Your despotic deity, with his hell for all who do 



86 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



not glorify him enough, and sugar-plum heaven 
for his flatterers, is an idol copied from some bar- 
baric king among his courtiers, with his racks and 
his patronages beside him : it has no place in nations 
where rulers are as much subject to the laws as the 
people, for whom, and not for princes, laws are 
established ; and where the poorest cannot be pun- 
ished but under codes that all must make and all 
obey." 

" Depart ! " cries the aspiring Religious Senti- 
ment. " To the earnest inquiry of liberated hearts 
for truth, you have been proved the false reply; 
now you stand in the light : there stationed across 
the path, mocking all knowledge, browbeating every 
brave seeker for truth, frightening the young with 
your bogies, flattening the heads of babes to make 
their brains into your own image and likeness, 
you are the enemies of all the great tendencies and 
ideals of this age, which, but for you, could even 
now perhaps attain the true faith and build the 
genuine shrine for which the Spirit of Man weeps 
and watches." 

Thus, in chorus, rise all noble voices. As the 
fires of Smithfield have made way for the Meat 
Market, so, after them, have the flames of God's 
eternal Smithfield faded out of the marts and daily 
life of the people. There is not a man or woman 
in London whose practice accords with a belief in 
the promises and threats of the Christian creed. 



ISENGRIMM. 



87 



How would it affect that man at his work, or in the 
theatre, if he believed that his child at home were 
in remote danger of being burnt for even five 
minutes ? The man who should offer his cheek to 
the smiter, his cloak to the robber, — who should not 
resist evil, but let scoundrelism have its way, — or the 
man who should take no thought for the morrow, — is 
not the kind of man anyone wishes his son to be. 
Who is it that sells all he has and gives to the poor ? 
Well enough, all this, for those who look for the 
swift destruction of the world, and are laying up 
treasures for a kingdom coming out of the sky ; but 
not for sane men, who eat the earth and find it 
sweet, and know that it will survive, as it has in 
the past, the advent and departure of many celestial 
kingdoms. England is the Cemetery of Religions : 
Druidism, Odinism, Romanism, came from afar to 
find their graves here ; and behold the feet of them 
which have buried those religions are at the door, 
and shall carry out also that which remains to 
frighten fools and make hypocrites of the able, 
moulding no heart to simplicity and grandeur. 




VI. 

ZAUBERPFEIFE. 



By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, 
and travailed through a Region- of smooth or idle Dreams, our His- 
tory now arrives on the Confines, where daylight and truth meet us 
with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at far distance, 
true colours and shapes. 

Milton. 

Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds : 
At which the universal host up sent 
A shout that tore hell's concave, and beyond 
Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night. 

Milton. 



ZAUBERPFEIFE. 




jURING the famous trial of Saurin v. Star 
and Kennedy, I went to watch the case in 
the interest of a silent and unrecognised 
party thereto. The incident of most interest to my 
client was this : on the production of a scapular in 
court, the Lord Chief Justice requested that it 
might be handed up for his inspection, confessing 
that he " did not know what a scapular was." Has 
it come to this ? 

Running through the European mythology one 
finds, in many variations, the legend of the magic 
music to whose measure all must keep step. From 
the falling of the walls of Jericho before the ram's 
horn of Joshua, or the rising of those of Thebes to 
the lyre of Orpheus, the old story passes to the 
magic horn with which Roland, at Roncesvalles, 
called his warriors from afar, or the flute by which, 
as he reappeared in fairy romance, he freed his 
lovely May-bird from the wicked enchantress. 
Adopted by Christianity in Germany, we find the 



9 2 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



magic pipe making the Jew dance among thorns 
until his wickedness is punished. And in England 
the same protean pipe is discovered sounding one of 
the first notes of Protestantism. " A mery Geste 
of the Frere and the Boye," first " emprynted at 
London in Flete-streete, at the sygne of the Sonne, 
by Wynkin de Worde," relates how the boy re- 
ceived, as one of three gifts, a pipe of magic power : 

All that may the pipe here 
Shall not themselfe stere, 
But laugh and lepe about. 

This original ee Tom, Tom, the piper's son," did not 
confine his cunning instrument to making cows and 
milkmaids dance. He so wrought upon a Friar that 
he capered until he lost 

His cope and scapelary 
And all his other wede. 

Was this profane lad but Henry the Eighth in dis- 
guise? Was his pipe the bugle of Cromwell? What- 
ever it may have been in history that made the 
English priest dance out of his cope and scapulary, 
we know what to-day represents the magic pipe, to 
whose sound all must move, and even mountains 
open, as they did before the Pied Piper of Hamelin. 
It is the steam-whistle. This it is to whose shrill 
remorseless note the age goes burrowing, tunnelling, 
bridging oceans, soaring over Alps and Rocky 



ZA UBERPFEIFE. 



93 



Mountains. The great steam-shuttles weave races 
and nations together. Can a people who travel by 
steamships fall back to swimming on a log in their 
religion? Men cannot, for any great length of 
time, be content to pass six days of the week in 
the Nineteenth Century, and recur to the means 
and methods of the Year One on the seventh. The 
Lord Chief Justice does not know what a scapular 
is. Some successor of his will be equally at a loss 
about my Lord Chief Justice's Wig. And the dance 
must go on till scapular, wig, and surplice shall all 
be found only in the Museum. 

Sharp, startling, by no means pleasant to the ear, 
is this steam-whistle, piercing through our quietest 
hour, invading our religious repose, dispelling slum- 
ber. It is, at present, too close to us. Only in its 
far echoes can we hear its softened tones ; there 
its notes are spiritualised to the sounds they must 
bear to the ear of the future, when it shall be said, 
Happy were they who dwelt near the fountains 
of those strains that built our hundred-gated civi- 
lisation! Noises reach not so far as music. The 
horns of Oberon, of Roland, called men to war and 
dismay ; but the struggles have passed away, and 
to us those horns bring only gentle and prophetic 
strains. 

So pipe on, pitiless engineer! Assiduous thou 
only to clear thy track, and bring certain bales and 
freights safe to yonder mart; but even now, to 



94 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



the wild echoes thou hast set flying, the very dust 
marches into shapes of beauty. Above the bass of 
Commerce is the clear tenor of Fraternity. Lo, 
there is a music on the air, as of the breaking of 
millions of chains ! From Italy, Russia, America, 
Spain, the echoes return in the happy voices of 
liberated hearts and homes. The dragons crawl 
away to their caverns. This one generation, with 
its vulgar steam-whistle, has witnessed the vanish- 
ing of more shadows from the earth, has seen more 
men and women disenthralled, more rays of intel- 
lectual light shed abroad upon mankind, than any 
ten generations which have preceded it ; and, ere it 
ceases, that shrill signal shall swell to the trump 
of the Last Judgment, bringing to the bar of Hu- 
manity every creed or institution of the earth. 




VII. 



CONTRIVANCES. 



The Supreme Intelligible is to be apprehended with the flower of 
the Intellect. 

By devoting the illumined Intellect to piety you shall preserve 
the changing forms of piety. 

Zoiioaster. 



Between us be truth ! 

Woe, 

Oh, woe upon the lie ! It frees not the breast 
Like the true-spoken word ; it comforts not, but tortures 

Him who devised it, and returns, 
An arrow once let fly, God-repelled, back 

On the bosom of the archer ! 

Goethe's Iphxgenia, 



CONTRIVANCES. 




T is the wail of the Nineteenth Century that 
one hears in Browning's Paracelsus ; most 
of all in that 

Sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung 

To their first fault, and withered in their pride. 

Over the sea the galleys bore the pilgrims seeking 
the promised island where they should build their 
shrines in peace. At last they are cast upon a rock. 
They bring forth their statues, and build their 
shrines, and sit together singing that their task is 
done ; when, lo ! the gentle islanders from the spot 
they were really seeking come in happy throngs to 
tell them that their isles, with olive-groves and 
temple-gates, are waiting for them and their shrines. 
The pilgrims have awaked from their dream too 
late. They see now how desolate is the rock which 
has received their precious freight, but they say, — 

Depart ! 

Our gifts, once given, must here abide. 

Our work is done ; we have no heart 
To mar our work. 

G 



9§ 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Cast, after its weary voyage over dark seas of 
misgiving and doubt, on this desolate shore of dogma, 
the human heart, in its pressing need of worship, 
invested the bareness with its own illusions, and 
raised thereon its holiest shrines. With the barren 
myths and dogmas — -lava-streams once, now cooled 
to rock — sacred ideals and precious humanities have 
become associated. Were it not so, not all the 
bribes could avail to keep Christianity here one day 
longer. To that old human heart, which it holds 
accursed, it is indebted for what vitality it still pos- 
sesses, through the illusions softening its hard 
outlines. 

My next visit was made to a small island in the 
great sea of London, where were gathered a little 
company of those who were trying to make the best 
of the " first fault." Their lucid statues shone upon 
the bare walls of a dismal room. It was Christmas - 
eve. On the wall was that emblem so dear to 
radicalism — the cross — made of evergreen, and be- 
neath it the legend : " Behold, I create all things 
new." I pretty soon found that it was a Society of 
Scholars established for the Contrivance of Means 
to hold on to the Symbols of Christianity. Chief 
among them was the noble brow and luminous eye 
of the great preacher of London (not your popular 
divine, orthodox reader, but an unpopular divine, 
who preaches to a few scores of people only!), who, 
in his conversation, dwelt much on the importance 



CONTRIVANCES. 



99 



that Theists should not consent to be divorced from 
the great religious heart and history of Christendom, 
but that the continuity of our religious development 
should be preserved. 

Thereon a guest ventured to comment somewhat 
after this wise : 

It were well enough to devote our energies to 
the preservation of the continuity of its religious 
development to the race, were it in danger ; but the 
reality of such continuity can no more be broken 
than our political or physical continuity. 

We do not call our diamonds coal, nor our 
opals flint, though such they essentially are. Why 
should our modern ideas be called Christian, ad- 
mitting they are simple crystallisations out of 
that substance, and not rather combinations of many 
religions ? So far as the fact itself is concerned, 
it is no more a just statement to say that our 
pure Theism is Christian because it was, perhaps, 
necessarily preceded by a Christian training, than 
to say that the American President is a King 
because his office was modified from the English 
throne. 

When words cease to be physiognomical, they 
become masks. Many persons of religious and 
political insight invest their ideas and schemes with 
a Christian phraseology because of the prestige 
which that phraseology has with the people whom 
they desire to influence. But prestige is simply 



ioo AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



prcBstigium, deceit; and surely that is a dangerous 
weapon for a true cause to use. 

What did Paul gain for us by using the sacrificial 
language ; or George Fox, by setting his inner light 
under the textual bushel ; or Swedenborg, by hiding 
his gold in scriptural ore? They gained stupid 
converts to whom they had no right, and whose low 
ideas gained new leases of life through the vitality 
of the new ideas about which they gathered only to 
petrify them. 

If the swift and the lame are to walk together, 
the pace must be that of the lame. Every radical- 
ism has been gradually pressed into the service of 
a false conservatism by the failure of idealists to 
remember this fact. 

The rationalist who uses the Christian name 
cannot with his single voice drown the voices of the 
centuries which have affixed to that name the sense 
which it bears for the common people. And though 
he may thereby win a temporary, though purely 
physical, advantage for some idea or cause, he will 
surely find in the end that he has been unravelling 
with one hand what he has been weaving with the 
other. The phraseology used to-day in the interest 
of progress cannot be denied to-morrow when it is 
pressed into the service of reaction. From the same 
pages which just now furnished the [Reformer with 
the Golden Rule, will be brought for Brigham Young 
the examples of polygamy, and for the Pope texts 



CONTRIVANCES. 



101 



favourable to celibacy. If Christ's words are good 
to be hurled against formalism, they are no less 
good to fill the air with good and evil spirits for 
the Spiritists. Jesus helped to harbour the fugitive 
slave in New England; Paul returned him to his 
master in Ohio. 

The continuity alone worth having is that which 
belongs to the very protoplasm, so to speak, of the 
moral nature, whose value and vitality depend on 
the completeness of its transformations. The transi- 
tional is always weak and ugly. Nature is glad to 
bury, almost beyond the skill of the paleontologist 
to discover them, the few links needed between her 
types. For the same reason we see around us 
Quakerism, Unitarianism, Swedenborgianism, and 
Christian Socialism, sinking in chronic decline, 
though each represents some fragmentary trait of 
the higher religious type. They are the vestiges of 
advanced minds who marched through the world 
with averted faces, seeking to draw the past forms 
with them. 

Surely, if there is one thing amply provided for 
in this world, quite able to spare the superservice- 
able aid of reformers, it is the religious " continuity " 
of our race. In the proportion that innovations 
affect things long held to be vital, the conservatism 
of society becomes stony. A new medical system, 
involving health and life, has far more to encounter 
than a new plough. And when a new religious 



io2 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



idea, affecting interests of an eternal nature, is ad- 
vanced, a cross in one age, a faggot in another, and 
anathemas always, are the first natural replies to it. 
The minds tending to abstract modes of thought 
are rare enough to warrant the concentration of their 
force upon the truth they see. For one pushing in 
the new direction, there are sure to be ten thousand 
pulling the other ; and, were the mere formal con- 
tinuity insisted upon of even real value, it is never 
in danger from insufficient advocacy. 

But the conservatism which alone is healthy is 
that which chiefly works to preserve the essential 
by means of the modifications necessary to adjust it 
to inevitable changes of social and moral conditions. 
No animal, it is shown, has any trait which is 
not now, or has not at some period been, of 
vital importance to it. Similarly we may conclude 
that every religious form or rite was once real, every 
watchword of conservatism was once the watchword 
of radicalism, all things old were once new. The 
Litany, idly repeated by happy-hearted youth, who 
yesterday were at croquet and cricket, was the out- 
burst of stricken hearts amid convulsions of nature, 
war, plague, and famine : uttered now, it is the 
mummy of a revival, set up where a real one is 
impossible. The first silent Quaker meeting was 
accidental ; the emotion of that hour is vainly sought 
for by the formal imitations of its silence. And so 
the rantings, shoutings, love-feasts, communions, 



CONTRIVANCES. 



103 



baptisms, are attempts to recover the ecstasies of 
shining moments by copying the superficial inci- 
dents that attended them, — attempts as absurd as 
the famous fidelity with which the Chinese manu- 
facturers imitated the tea-set they were required to 
replace, even to the extent of preserving all the 
cracks and flaws of the originals. By this fatal 
following of the letter, the prophets of the past are 
made to conspire against their own visions in the 
present. The dogma of a Trinity was, in its origin, 
the petrifaction of elements devised by bold free- 
thinkers in their advance from polytheism to mono- 
theism : as held over the world now, it is Plato and 
Philo forced to impose a fetter upon their own 
brother-spirits who to-day would fulfil their aims. 
Religious history thus presents a series of adaptations, 
each in its day an innovation, but for which the de- 
velopment of the moral sentiment would have been 
arrested. That which calls itself conservatism ad- 
heres to forms that must become fossil, whereas any 
true conservatism must rescue the essence by trans- 
ferring it to forms which have their life yet to live. 
Mere impenetrability is not conservatism. 

In an old town I read on an ancient tablet the 
eulogium upon a public-spirited citizen who had 
built in the centre of it a substantial market-house ; 
and near it was another in commemoration of a 
citizen who had removed the same when, in the 
course of the town's growth, it had become an 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



obstacle, — replacing it with a handsome square. 
Ah, could the citizens only have looked with as 
much common sense on the mouldy church, with 
its mouldier creed, standing near ! 



VIII. 

CHRISTIAN IDEALISM. 



To what religion do I belong? To none that thou mightst 
name. And wherefore to none ? For Religion's sake. 

Schiller. 



Never did sculptor's dream unfold 
A form which marble doth not hold 
In its white block. 

Michel Angelo Buonakotti. 



CHRISTIAN IDEALISM. 




CONSTITUENCY will create its own 
representatives. After ages clamorous for 
philosophical supporters of the existing 
creed, there is no reason to question the sincerity 
of those thinkers who believe that, along with the 
virtues and graces enshrined by the earnest and 
ignorant people under the gloomy roof of Christian 
dogma, there may be set up also the pure ideals 
of Reason and Religion. Difficult as some find it to 
see anything but casuistry in the attempt of the 
Broad Church to uphold the Thirty-nine Articles 
with one hand, and the facts of Science with the 
other, one need not doubt that eminent Liberal 
Christians have convinced themselves that Chris- 
tianity, rightly interpreted, includes the highest 
modern ideas of religion and philanthropy. The 
eye is the most cunning of painters, and, as Words- 
worth says, brings to land and sea a light that never 
was upon them. There is no object that cannot be 
transfigured in the light of pious sentiment. For 
ages the serpent was supplicated and worshipped by 



io8 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Turanian tribes, through fear of it ; but when the 
Serpent-God comes in contact with the higher 
Jahvistic or Astral religions, which declare it 
accursed, and bid it crawl on its belly in the dust 
for ever, does it obey? Nay, it is caught up by 
the higher faith; it climbs on the staff of Moses, of 
iEsculapius, of Mercury ; its spots are raised to typify 
the adorable stars of heaven, its coil is the circle of 
eternity, its curve is the tracery of the rainbow. 

The sacrifice of men to the king-serpent in the 
realm of Dahomey is far removed from the saying of 
the Hindu Scripture : " Justice is so dear to the 
heart of Nature, that if in the last day one atom of 
Injustice should be found, the Universe would 
shrivel like a snake-skin to cast it off for ever." 
The distance between the deadly reptile in the dust, 
and " the serpent that is lifted up," is not more vast 
than that between the Cross that leads Constantine 
and that which fills the eye of C banning. 

What worshipful ideal has not the ingenious 
mind of man managed to stuff into the onion, — 
with its layers repeating in miniature the planetary 
envelopes of Chaldaean astronomy, — and manifold 
other things intrinsically mean, which it found 
representing some crude notion or ignorant fear of 
savage tribes ! The advancing religion begins with 
attempting to exterminate that which it finds, but 
generally ends by compromising with it. It breathes 
a new life through existing forms. 



CHRISTIAN IDEALISM. 



The result of this process is, that whatever now 
chooses to call itself Christianity will be found only 
some chapter in the intellectual and moral history of 
the race. One age exaggerated personal details 
concerning Jesus ; another petrified his tropes into 
dogmas : each finds in his teachings an alphabet 
ready to spell the sentence desired of it ; and each 
interpreter, fired with the spirit of his age, feels 
himself a crusader rescuing the Holy Faith from in- 
fidel corruptions. Here is our mystic of to-day, for 
example, who finds all the Nineteenth Century 
covered by Christ. He has suffered under Alex- 
andria, and been buried under Rome ; now shall he 
rise as an Englishman, an American. " Justifica- 
tion by faith is honesty in trade/' cries the radical ; 
ec and regeneration is Socialism." " I am deter- 
mined," cries the abolitionist, " to know nothing 
among you but the black man and him enslaved." 
" Every supper must be the Lord's supper," says 
the dietetic apostle. And similarly the birth from 
a virgin, baptism, and all the mysteries, are made to 
do duty on the teeming platforms. 

In an old, small, dismal room, I heard one 
haranguing his slender auditory in this fashion : 

" A measuring-worm lifting itself upward, then 
prone upon the earth ; a serpent, star-spotted, 
flower-spotted, slipping from one skin to another, 
yet ever surrounding the earth; the climbing, fall- 
ing sea; — by such types have mankind, in many 



no AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



lands and ages, expressed their perception of the 
peristaltic movement of the universe. Man looks up 
to the wondrous heavens, and awe, the mother of 
worship, is born within him : the needs of earth drag 
him back again, and the lowest objects are adored. 
From materialistic chaos, and the supplication of 
deadly reptiles, inspired by dread, comes the rebound 
to astronomic religion. From the fatal oppression of 
the stars, which could look pitilessly down on adoring 
task-masters and groaning bondsmen, the eye turns 
earthward again. Out of the silent mythologic 
heavens one star alone shines for the wise men, 
the star moving westward, to disappear there where 
its glory is born on the earth ; and 6 Glory to God 
in the highest' begins to mean good will to men. 
The poets of an era, they are the sons of the 
morning, theirs is the angel-chorus; not from the 
legends of apostles, but from the full hearts that 
soar into song, comes the grandeur of a people 
turning from Cassar on his throne to a peasant 
on his ass. This man, then, — the carpenter's son, 
come of our meanest village, without place to lay 
his head, — hath the truth in his heart, palpable to 
him as to Caesar his sceptre ; he, in his loneliness 
and poverty, is the favourite and son of God ! Who 
is he that overcometh the world, but he that can 
pierce through its glittering shows, and see this 
Nazarene peasant to be the son of God? From 
that moment the old heavens begin to fade ; on the 



CHRISTIAN IDEALISM. 



1 1 1 



seer's eye shines already the new heaven, to whose 
every tint the new earth must respond. The pro- 
cession of growths on earth must follow the proces- 
sion of seasons in the sky. A new firmament of 
ideas vaults above man, and each must trace itself 
on the sod of human life. 

" s There is nothing new under the sun,' said 
the sage. 6 Behold, I make all things new,' said the 
seer. A thousand revolutions germinated when the 
people knelt before a right and true, and a poor, man. 
He was born amid the wild winter, said the poets ; 
his infant head was laid low amid the beasts of the 
stall: his cause must struggle with the hostile ele- 
ments of an icy conservatism ; its helpless infancy 
must be confided to donkeys, who shall mingle 
many a bray with this new gospel. All the old 
fables about Jahve, Zeus, and the rest, shall 
swathe this babe. Nevertheless, to us this child is 
born ; where he enters idols shall fall, oracles be 
struck dumb, and all the signs of the heavens hold 
themselves honoured in weaving an aureole about 
the brow of a Man. This babe shall consecrate 
every babe ; this mechanic shall establish the dig- 
nity of labour ; this pauper shall liberate slaves and 
strike off the burdens of the poor. 

" Slowly, however, and not without another 
backward swing of the pendulum. Not easily do 
Kings and priests surrender their power, though 
they may be quite willing to baptise it in names 



H2 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



beloved of the people. What cares your priest 
whether the oracle that overpowers the common 
sense he fears be named Delphos, Church, Pope, or 
Bible ? What cares the King whether he rule by 
authority of Jupiter or of Jesus, so that the masses 
look upon his Kingdom with awe, as identical with 
the Kingdom of God ? Can High-Priest or ambi- 
tious monarch afford to waste all this enthusiasm 
about one Jesus of Nazareth? The Scribes and 
Pharisees hate him, but the people tread one upon 
another to see and hear him. Pilate knows well 
where his Roman master's interests lie, and steadily 
sets himself to save Jesus — as some think, did save 
him, cheating the cross of its victim. The French 
usurper to-day affixes the seal of his dynasty to the 
poor man's title to his cot, and says : ( If I fall, your 
title falls with me.' The conqueror of the past in- 
vested his tenure with a name that had become the 
treasure of the poor. The priesthoods hasten to 
array their gods in Christian garb, and twine the 
superstitions by which they exist about the Cross. 
And now, on the banner floating from palace and 
temple, there is a cross, with e Hoc signo vinces' be- 
neath it; a cross, however, nearly resembling the 
sword by which Christianity was overcome while it 
conquered, to be transmitted to this day as the most 
powerful defender of every wrong against which 
Jesus hurled his great heart. The last of the Cassars 
held the stirrup of a Christian Pontiff: so far had 



CHRISTIAN IDEALISM. 



113 



that religion, which Tacitus found so despicable, 
triumphed. But the emperor knew his menial ser- 
vice would be fully paid. These Western Nations 
have coined the hearts' blood of many generations 
to pay for that fatal triumph. 

" When the cross, from being a slave's gallows, 
shone out in the sky as the imperial symbol of Con- 
stantine, it marked the reaction of the world from 
the religion represented in the lowliness and simple 
humanity of the Nazarene peasant. Skyward again 
went the'mind of man, and saw Christ there blend- 
ing with the constellations of gods and goddesses, 
who also, no doubt, had been toiling and suffering 
men and women, raised now into barren abstractions 
by a similar force. And when Christianity turned 
from the earth and man, whom it had consecrated, to 
attend to God and his heavens, the ancient deities 
mounted to their niches in its temple, not, however, 
as of old, in their warm living and life-giving forms, 
— in those forms they now haunted the earth as 
demons, — but as a celestial court, in cold apotheosis. 
Not duty to man, who needed it, but to God, who 
needed it not ; not fidelity to the w T orld, but con- 
tempt and hatred of it; not human virtue, but rites 
and prayers, recounting to God the items of his 
magnificence ; not mercy, but sacrifice, in which 
reason and human affection replaced as victims the 
roasted flesh he was formerly thought to enjoy; not 
actual men, but fictitious angels; — these became 

H 



ii4 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



the insignia of the poor wayside preacher of justice, 
love, and peace. To seek his sepulchre over the 
slaughtered bodies of his brothers ; to adore him as 
God, and kill all who did not ; to invoke him as a 
deity one day of the week, and crucify him as a 
man through the rest: so did the dead Jesus 
reenthrone every wrong against which the living 
Jesus had protested. To a Pope willing to limit the 
real Christ to another planet altogether, while in- 
vesting every scheme of selfishness and ambition 
with the sanctity of his name, why should not a 
Caesar be stirrup-holder ? 

" Caesar still lives ; but under him, as before, 
Jesus suffers. Once more is he buried in the rich 
man's tomb. Will he rise again to be, as at first, 
the lowly friend of man ?" 

None ventured an answer. But as I went away 
I met a child astride a stick horse, beguiling himself 
with the pretence that he was carried by that which 
he carried; and the question, "Will Christ rise 
again?" seemed to me to depend upon another: how 
long will endure the religious infancy of the world, 
which, after Jesus has been made to follow and 
reflect every ascent and descent of society for fifty 
generations, still holds the illusion that he carries, 
but is not carried ? 



IX. 



THE CROSS. 



I desire that whatever merits I may have gained by good works 
may fall upon other people. May I be born again with them in the 
heaven of the blessed, be admitted to the family of Mi-le, and serve 
the Buddha of the Future ! 

HlOUEN-THSANG. 

Firmian merely replied : " More than one Saviour has already 
died for the earth and man ; and I am convinced that Christ will one 
day take many pious human beings by the hand, and say to them : 
Ye, too, have suffered under Pilates.' " 

Jean Paul Richtek. 

Far easier to condemn his injurers, 

Than for the tongue to reach his smallest worth. 

Michel Angelo Buonarotti. 



THE CROSS. 



EARLY all the incidents of my pilgrimage 
were connected with places close around 
my London home. Once, however, I 
found myself at the ancient convent of Troitska 
(Trinity), in Russia. Among other things which I 
saw there was a little plate of agate, set with costly 
jewels, bearing on it a picture of the Cross, with a 
human figure upon it, and a kneeling monk with 
clasped hands stretched out toward it. All this it 
was declared was in the grain of the agate when it 
was found in its quarry. As the work of Nature it 
had been adored and adorned by the Metropolitan 
Plato, and by him bequeathed to the convent. So 
delicately were the figures inwrought with the 
crystal, that it seemed almost as marvellous as a 
work of art as it could be if considered a natural 
production. And though I was forced to conclude 
that it was an ingenious instance of the pious frauds 
one meets at every step in priest-ridden countries, 
the fact was still before me that the Cross must 




n8 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



have been very deep in human nature before any 
artist could have laboured so hard to represent it as 
dear to physical nature. Indeed, no other symbol 
reaches so far back in the religious history of the 
race. Jesus spoke to those around him of bearing 
the Cross, long before he saw it raised on his own 
path ; and though some have fancied that he in 
using, and his disciples in comprehending, the 
phrase, foresaw the end awaiting him, there is 
reason to believe that it came to him as a surprise 
and a terror, and that he felt as if God had forsaken 
him because he was not rescued from it. The truth 
is, it was a symbol in many lands long before it was 
adopted by Christianity. 

We read of many ancient and modern religions, 
of gods many and lords many, all of them sur- 
rounded with fables and symbols ; and at first sight 
it seems amazing that the human mind could invent 
so many. But when they come to be sifted by 
Comparative Mythology, we are rather astonished 
to find there are so few. The myths of the New 
Testament are repetitions of those of the Old, 
mingled with those of Greece ; and the mythology 
of Greece is mainly a modification of that of Egypt. 
But most of these, again, had previously done duty 
in Chaldaaa, Arabia, and Persia. There is but 
one religion, as there is but one animal. Super- 
stition has an old stock of sacred legends, and Moses, 
Zoroaster, Gautama, Jesus, have been successively 



THE CROSS. 



119 



dressed from the same old wardrobe ; until now, when 
they are threadbare, we can trace every shred of them 
back to the first crude speculations with which man 
looked out upon the mystery above and around him. 

Of all the symbols, the most universal was the 
Cross. The gods, said Plato, have built this uni- 
verse after the sign of the Cross. One finds the 
Cross raised on old Druidical stones in Brittany, 
with peasants kneeling around. Such pedestals 
have been selected by priests to indicate the triumph 
of Christ over paganism ; but some, at least, of the 
ancient temples where they stand are themselves 
cruciform, and the Christian Cross only a later leaf 
out of that old stem. 

It has had many meanings. It has had a serpent 
twined about it, and a man nailed on it. It has sig- 
nified generation in one age, and regeneration in 
another. Archaeology may find some of the many 
languages it has spoken ; but it is probable that the 
interpretation which the human heart has gradually 
fixed upon it is the foundation of all crosses, and 
that we may now accept it as a symbol of sacrifice, 
whose significance will grow as the religious senti- 
ment grows. 

In ordinary times it is difficult for us to appre- 
ciate the power of a symbol. Poets and orators 
have told us how long the old British flag has borne 
the battle and the breeze : on that symbol every 
line has been traced by some epoch, and the heroic 



120 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



achievements of centuries are summed up in its 
devices. Yet we pass it commonly without notice. 
But let a war break out between England and some 
foreign country to-day, and to-morrow the old flag 
would float out from a million houses like blossoms 
in Spring. Faces would flush and eyes grow moist 
as they saw it borne along the streets by determined 
men. A heat like that of which it was born would 
bring out its ancient inscriptions. And so, when 
wrong seeks again to crucify right, a holy light 
gathers around the old banner of religious devotion. 
When John Brown, of Harper's Ferry, was about 
to be hung for his armed attack on Slavery in Vir- 
ginia, all saw a new shape in the gallows erected 
for him, from the negro preacher, who said to 
his swarthy hearers, " John Brown is your Saviour ; 
he dies for you; his blood will redeem you," — 
up to Emerson, who said, " If he shall die on the 
gallows, he will make it glorious like a Cross;" 
and Victor Hugo, who drew a weird picture of the 
hanging man, and wrote under it, JEcce ! The story 
of one struggling cause is the story of all. The 
Smithfielcl stake, the thumbscrew, the Virginian 
gallows, the social ostracism of a heretic, — they are 
all crosses, whatever the actual shape they take. 

Dr. Rowland Williams said to English Chris- 
tians : " You will never convert the Hindoos to the 
Trinity, or to our form of Christianity, any more 
than you can grow our flowers in their soil or cli- 



THE CROSS. 



121 



mate; you can only christianise them by showing 
that our religion is a higher development of what 
their religion teaches — justice and self-denial." In 
a country whose priests condemned Dr. Williams 
for so saying, and crucified, to the best of their 
ability, the man who dared be a Bishop after 
writing in the same book with him, we can hardly 
hope that his admonition will produce any effect ; 
we may look rather for a continuance of the 
missionary effort which returns the cross to the 
purposes it served while as yet it was a Roman 
gibbet, and magnifies Jesus as the industrious captain 
of gunboats, ready to fire on all villages which will 
not accept him. But the poor pagans cannot so long 
bear the cross laid upon them by Christendom with- 
out discerning some of its deeper meanings. The first 
Roman Catholic missionaries who tried to plant their 
Church in Japan were slain. It was made a criminal 
offence to name the name of Christ in Japan. But 
lately a Japanese man cautiously unfolded from his 
garment one of their old crosses, and showed it to 
an American officer in that region, saying it had been 
handed down as a precious heirloom in his family. 
He knew no Christian or Catholic dogma, but only 
that those who cherished that cross had one by one 
suffered and died for it. So much alone had power 
to survive. 

Many errors are the distorted shadows of truths. 
So much is true even of vicarious sacrifice, that one 



122 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



thing yields its life to feed the life of another: the 
corn of wheat is victim of the full ear ; the mother 
is consumed before her babe, as by a flame of devo- 
tion. It is true, also, that Jesus, like every martyr, 
bears on his cross the sins of us all. The spirit that 
nailed him there is the spirit which animates every 
rejection of truth, or persecution of truth's mes- 
sengers. The blood of Abel comes upon every 
generation that partakes the spirit of Cain. 

But sacrifice — a word meaning simply a religious 
act — has been perverted to mean the parting with 
some interest to please Grod. Even educated people 
speak of the virtues of self-sacrifice, as if it were 
other than a relic of human sacrifice. Yet even in 
the days of human sacrifice there was rarely a 
thought of offering up the ee self" to the god ; rather 
it was the soul parting with flesh to attain a higher 
joy. The hope of rejoining her husband made the 
flame of his pyre cool to the Indian widow's heart. 
It is unworthy of many who use the phrase to speak 
of the preference of rectitude to animalism, or of 
justice to wealth, as the sacrifice of self. 'Tis the 
realisation of self. The yielding of a lower for a 
higher pleasure is the epicurean art of him who will 
feast on the dainties of existence. The monkish 
Wend that the Cross of Christ was made of the 
wood of Eden's Tree of Life has more truth in it. 
Whether the Cross were originally a rudely-designed 
tree, or whether a phallic symbol, it meant fruit 



THE CROSS. 



123 



and birth, and only such labours and pangs as attend 
these ; and so far as it is rescued from the Christian 
superstition, which has degraded it to the altar 
of a human sacrifice, it will mean man bearing 
his appointed fruit, — finding therein his supremest 
self. 

The Cross has its roots deeper in nature than the 
priests of Troitska have found, and its fruit is 
perennial. The light of sacred story does indeed, 
as says the hymn, gather around it. As out of the 
old heaven of stars worshipped by Chaldaean shep- 
herds one star came to point the way to a holier fire 
kindled on earth, out of the fading constellations of 
Christian mythology the Cross will still stand to 
guide the pilgrim. There are more languages upon 
it than Pilate ever inscribed ; it has its word for 
every age or land, and for every conflict between 
what is base and what is noble without and within 
us. The old proverbs about it are sufficiently 
translatable. Every Cross hath its inscription. The 
Cross will put to flight any demon. Crosses are 
ladders to heaven. No cross, no crown. 

For this symbol denotes a thing done for the 
right. It is action alone that supplies to sentiment 
the sun and rain without which it must remain 
barren. And where right and true action is, there 
shines the sign which illuminates all true Scriptures. 
Comte has been counted insane when he named his 
servant- woman in his Calendar of Saints ; but it 



124 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



may have been done in his sanest moment. The 
radiance of all suns is in the minutest sunbeam ; 
the humblest duty done has God at its core. 

So returned I from Troitska to London, passing 
many old crosses on the way, — memorial crosses, 
market crosses, spire-crosses. They were but sha- 
dowy fingers pointing to others meekly borne by 
exiles and heretics in far-off islands and obscure 
homes. These I sought out, and some said of their 
cross, It is a thorny stem, but bears roses. But 
most of them knew not of any cross. They were 
like the Puritan Pilgrims, who could not endure 
the sight of any church cross, because the bleak 
shore and Arctic sky of New England shaped one 
too real to be represented by that which had be 
come the symbol of crucifiers rather than of the 
crucified. 

So saith the pilgrim to each who has found his 
post in the conflict, to each who has caught some 
gleam of the ideal shining over his earthly lot, — 
Name not thy cross, but bear it, and it will bear 
thee. 



X. 



VIA CRUCIS. 



Quosque patiere, bone Jesu! 

Judaei te semel, ego saepius crueifixi ; 

Illi in Asia, ego in Britannia, 

Gallia, Germania. 
Bone Jesu, miserere mei et Judseorum ! 

Sir Thomas Browne. 



VIA CRUCIS. 




IKE human sacrifices still offered to idols in 
England ? 

' What is an idol ? It is anything set 
up as having an authority independent of reason 
and conscience, or requiring a service not primarily 
based on considerations of human welfare. It need 
not be a visible image. Let it command the action 
without persuading the reason, let the service paid 
it be for its own majesty, in however slight a degree, 
and not purely for the well-being of man : it is an 
idol — be it book, creed, or holy day. He who 
conceives of a deity governing not entirely for the 
governed, or one who cares whether men obey or 
disobey, believe or deny his existence, for his own 
sake, conceives of an idol. 

Every idol has human sacrifices offered to it. 
An idol may be recognised by this — that a service 
is paid it because claimed; such service, whether 
it prove in some respects advantageous to man or 
not, involving a sacrifice of so much freedom and of 



128 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



so much devotion to humanity. Those sacrificed 
need not be bound and slaughtered bodily on an 
altar; the principle is in action where the least 
thing which conscience and common sense would 
prescribe, were there no God at all, for the develop- 
ment or happiness of mankind, is set aside for the 
glory, or at the demand, of a deity. The Nestorian 
Christians of the mountain districts will kill a 
man found travelling on Sunday ; but if the health 
of London labourers, or their mental improvement, 
be subordinated to the religious observance of the 
same day, they are just as really sacrificed. The 
Skopsis of Russia mutilate themselves in obedience 
to Christ's unmistakable commendation of those 
"who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom 
of heaven's sake;" but if, in obedience to a supposed 
divine authority, a man believes anything that, upon 
human statement, he would reject as incredible, he 
has mutilated himself far more seriously than the 
Russian fanatic : he has sacrificed his reason. Health, 
intellect, instinct, culture, happiness, — if these be 
sacrificed, how can it be said there is no human 
sacrifice ? 

On Good Friday, I went with a learned Mus- 
sulman to follow about the London Docks a clergy- 
man celebrating the " Stations of the Cross." The 
Cross, in black, was by the gates, on the walls, 
over the altar; to it the priests and their people 
knelt, crossing themselves. Some visitors seemed 



VIA CRUCIS. 



129 



astonished — not so ray friend from Calcutta. He 
was already familiar with symbols covering temple 
walls. And when the procession started to follow 
the veiled cross through the streets, he needed not 
to draw upon his oriental imagination to see how 
slight an increase of thickness in the veil was re- 
quired to make it a procession of Brahmins follow- 
ing the goddess Durgha with hymns ; or of Moham- 
medans following with funereal march the image of 
Hoosain, the Prophet's grandson, slain by the man 
whose guest he was. 

Through many wretched streets we passed. By 
our sides thronged the ragged, the diseased, the 
miserable ; women of the street, caricaturing the 
hymns with loud screaming ; scoffing men and boys. 
Many long hymns about " Jesu" were sung: over 
and again the clergyman, in his quaint skull-cap 
and monkish dress, told the story of the ancient 
tragedy. At no time did Calvary excite so much 
sympathy as the wailing of a wounded child near 
one of the " Stations." The preacher preached 
without feeling, the priests sang with hollow voices, 
and no one along this Way of the Cross seemed at 
any time moved, save one woman who, in a moment 
of enthusiasm, hurled a large bowl at the procession, 
with a wild malediction on " the Puseyites." The 
bowl struck pretty sharply the hand that now 
records the incident; but the priest claimed the 
martyrdom of the malediction, and said at the next 

1 



i 3 o 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Station, " Do you fear being called a Puseyite ? — 
we must bear our Cross !" 

The Mussulman, as I have intimated, did not 
find the affair very novel, and his patience gave 
way; but before he left me, on the way to the 
Fourth Station, he inquired particularly into the 
meaning of Good Friday, and why it was celebrated 
in all the churches ; and I was constrained to tell 
him that on that day, according to the Christian 
religion, a great human sacrifice was offered up to 
appease the offended majesty of God. The Cross 
was an altar, the bleeding man upon it was there 
by divine requirement, in atonement for the sins of 
the world. And are the people willing to accept 
salvation through the death of a good man ? Even so. 
But is this the view of the masses of Christians, or 
only of a few eccentric religionists ? Alas, it is 
only the eccentric few who do not believe it ! And 
how far does this idea affect the social and moral 
life of the people ? It penetrates every vein of our 
civilisation ; there is no man, woman, or child in 
this kingdom who is not in some way and degree — 
morally, mentally, physically, or politically — sacri- 
ficed to the God who, as this people believes, was 
only restrained from sending us all to eternal 
tortures by his satisfaction through that human 
sacrifice. 

This Cross which attracted two or three hundred 
curious followers in the East of London was only 



VIA CRUCIS. 



the shadow of the actual one borne through this land 
day by day, and year by year. Could this people 
only have had for that one day the eye of the wor- 
shipper of Allah, they would have found their 
Good Friday a mirror, and in it beheld the fearful 
face of the religion that is turning their heart to 
stone. They would have left their clergy and their 
choristers to pray and chant to empty pews, and 
gathered like the weeping daughters of Jerusalem 
at Trafalgar Square. It was there the crucified 
peasant really stood that day, crying : " Is it no- 
thing to you, O all ye that pass by, that these my 
brothers hunger unfed and shiver unclothed, and 
that in the wretched dens they have left are pale 
women and children with the nails of poverty and 
disease piercing their hands and feet ? Spare your 
* sympathies for a cross and victim turned to dust 
these many ages, and know that every coin that 
goes to the honour of that victim, when it might 
save these miserable ones, changes him from a friend 
to a crucifier of men I" 

Or the worshippers of the Churches, had they 
possessed the Mussulman's eye, might have gathered 
together in St. Bartholomew's Church, to see 
twenty-five aged widows crouching on the floor to 
pick up twenty-five sixpences. Long years ago a 
wealthy lady bequeathed money, that on every 
Good Friday twenty-five such widows should find 
on her gravestone as many sixpences, to be theirs 



132 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



if they could and would stoop for the same. The 
lady's gravestone is now undiscoverable ; but here 
are the poor old women torturing their stiff joints 
to get to the sixpences. "Why not," murmured 
one or two present, — i( why not give the poor crea- 
tures the sixpences without all that ado ?" Little 
did such realise the revolutionary character of their 
murmurs. The chemist tried to draw the birth- 
mark from his wife's cheek ; the birth-mark vanished 
— the wife lay dead. The old custom in St. Bar- 
tholomew's may fall into desuetude ; but to abolish 
it consistently were to touch the tenure of every 
institution in England. What are all our charities, 
our endowments, but the picking up of sixpences 
from the gravestones of the dead? What is our 
education but the deciphering of literatures that are 
but the mouldering epitaphs of other lands and 
ages? What is our religion, what are these cele- 
brations of Good Friday, but a crouching of human 
beings, with painful humiliations, to take from a 
hero's grave the treasures he had earned ? We are 
ruled by dead men. Every acre of ground is fol- 
lowing the wills of those whose names are utterly 
forgotten by the generations they are still able to 
feed or starve. The purest reason or justice must 
bow to the precedents of bleached crania. The 
Constitution is the collective wisdom of the vast 
Parliament of skeletons by which we are governed. 
In Church and State the living generations are 



VIA CRUCIS. 



3 3 



sacrificed to their ancestors. All of which was 
sufficiently visible on Good Friday to every eye not 
itself the product of the System ; and it is the true 
Via Cruris around the world ! 

I was one of a horror-stricken company which 
listened to the fearful story of an Indian family, 
whose parents reared and cherished in their home a 
crocodile, regarding it as a god. When the reptile 
grew large enough, it devoured one of the children. 
The parents, so far from thinking any the worse of 
the beast, looked upon it as a favour to the child to 
be so incorporated with their deity. Of course the 
last penny of our company was at the service of 
any missionary ready to go to the region where the 
incident was said to have occurred. 

But there are intelligent Indians in England 
who might have read in the newspapers of April 9, 
1870, the following: — 

The "Peculiar People" again. — At the last Orsett Petty 
Sessions, John Baker, a man in respectable circumstances, was 
charged before the Eevs. "W. H. Eichards, J. Windle, and J. Blom- 
field, with having neglected to provide necessary medical aid for his 
child, Jesse Baker, aged two years and eight months, who, it was 
presumed, had been allowed to die without any medical assistance. 

This is the fourth case of helpless children belonging to this sect, 
now very numerous in Essex, having been allowed so to die within 
the past few weeks. 

Mr. A. H. Hunt, clerk to the Orsett Board of Guardians, attended 
for the prosecution, and stated that the summons was taken out by 
the guardians, who considered it now their duty to take the matter 
up, owing to several deaths having lately occurred, and prosecute 
according to the powers given to them by a recent statute, 31st and 



!34 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE, 



32nd Vic. c. 122, sec. 37, which enacts that where parents allow 
their children to die without medical aid they shall be liable to six 
months' imprisonment. This was the second child the defendant had 
within the past few weeks allowed to die. 

Mr. A. W. Mercer, surgeon, was next called, and his evidence 
went to show that he was ordered by the Coroner to make a post- 
mortem examination of the body of another child belonging to the 
defendant, and while performing the operation he saw the second 
child now alluded to in the present case lying very ill. As the first 
child had been allowed to die without medical assistance, he strongly 
urged the mother and three other women to permit him to give the 
child some medicine, as it was very dangerously ill; but the mother 
and the other women positively refused him permission to give the 
child anything. He then advised them to put a plaster upon it and 
give it stimulants, but that they also refused. 

Ann Cunningham stated that she was one of the three sisters who 
attended the child. It had every nourishment, but had no medicine. 
Everything that was possible to do for it according to their religion 
was done. The elders were sent for, and they laid hand on it, and 
they anointed it with the holy oil. 

That being the case for the prosecution, the magistrates asked 
the defendant what he had to say to the charge. 

The Defendant. — "What I have to say is this : the Lord saved me 
from my sins eleven years ago, and I now go according to the 
Scripture, and follow Christ. In the days of Christ, just before 
he departed, he said, " If I depart, I will send the Comforter unto 
you ;" and it was that Spirit which I received eleven years ago that 
guided me to fulfil his commands in this case. The "Word of God 
tells me to pray, and that if any are sick, let him send for the elders 
of the Church to anoint the sick with oil, and pray over him. This 
is what I believe in, and what I have done ; and if my child had not 
been sick unto death, it would have recovered ; but as it did not 
recover, it was the Lord's will that it should die. In the last chapter 
of St. Mark, does it not say of them that believe, " In my name shall 
they cast out devils ; . . . they shall lay hands on the sick, and 
they shall recover" ? 

Here a number of brethren and sisters who were in the court shouted 
out — " Yes, yes ; blessed be his name !" and other similar ejaculations' 

The Chairman. —But there is nothing in that to tell you not to 
send for a doctor. 



VIA CRUCIS. 



*35 



The Defendant. — There is no passage in the whole book where I 
am told to send for a doctor. The command is, " Send for the elders 
of the Church, and let them lay hands on him and anoint him with 
oil." 

One of the elders of the Church, named John Butcher, was next 
called, who stated that he was a wharfinger, and one of the elders ; 
the child's mother sent for him, and he went and laid hands 
upon it, prayed over it, and anointed it with oil, on several occa- 
sions. 

The Clerk. — "What name do your denomination give themselves ? 

Witness. — Just what the Bible says we are — " a chosen and a 
peculiar people, holy unto the Lord." ¥e are not ashamed of ou: 
name. There were other elders sent for besides me. We had 
prayer-meeting in the room, and there was a lot of us there the night 
the child died. We held the meeting from seven till nine. 

The Chairman. — "What would you do yourself if you had a leg 
broken ? You would send for a medical man then, would you not ? 

Witness. — If I live unto God, I shall not have a broken leg ; if I 
do not, I might be liable to such a chastisement. God has promised 
to take care of the righteous, and there have been no broken legs 
amongst us. 

After very voluminous evidence, the bench retired for consultation. 

The Chairman, on returning, said they gave the defendant credit 
for sincerity, but they were bound to convict. Nevertheless, as it 
was under a recent Act, not generally known, they would exercise a 
power given to them to discharge him now on entering into his own 
recognisances to come up for sentence when called upon. They 
hoped such a case would not occur again. 

The Defendant.— Well, I mean to go on exactly as I have done ; 
and whether I break the law or not, I mean to follow Christ, and put 
my trust in him. I bless God now for having taken my case up. 
It is he that has come to my assistance now. 

Here a number of the brethren and sisters shouted, " Yes, yes; 
praise him and trust in him." 

The parties then left the court, evidently under the belief that the 
defendant was a rescued martyr. 



No doubt, if the reverend magistrates who heard 
this ease had been so inclined, they could have 



136 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



strengthened the case of the Peculiar People. They 
might, for instance, have reminded them of the 
warning against physicians represented in the case 
of King Asa : " In his disease he sought not to the 
Lord, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with 
his fathers." They might have remembered the 
case of the woman who had an issue of blood, ee and 
had suffered many things of many physicians, and 
had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, 
but rather grew worse," but who was healed by 
touching the garment of Jesus. At any rate, they 
must have known that the position taken up by the 
parents was impregnably based upon the Bible, and 
it is not likely they will ever be brought up to 
receive sentence. 

But can any honest man deny that the four 
children thus slain before the Bible were any the 
less victims to an idol than the Hindoo child de- 
voured by the crocodile-god of the Ganges ? 

In the same newspaper which reports the trial 
of the Peculiar People there is an account of a 
o-reat meeting held at St. James's Hall to advocate 
religious education. It was attended by several 
Dukes, several Earls and Lords, and by thirteen 
Members of Parliament. The Chairman, an Earl, 
said that " in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the 
religion of the working man was simply what he 
read in the Bible," and that what they demanded 
was that " the Bible, and the teaching of the 



VIA CRUCIS. 



137 



Bible, should be for the children of the Empire an 
essential." 

What does the working man derive from the 
Bible ? Not long ago a man named Mobbs was 
executed for murdering a boy, from whom he had 
received no provocation whatever. The entire 
absence of any apparent motive for the deed led 
the prisoner's counsel to put forward a plea of in- 
sanity. Before his execution, Mobbs made a con- 
fession, in which he traced his deed to a morbid 
condition of mind produced by reading two things ; 
one was a copy of the Illustrated Police News, with 
a pictorial account of the Alton murder ; the other, 
the story of Cain and Abel. This was the 
food which fed the wild beast in Mobbs into fatal 
strength. When the confession was published, there 
was a great outcry against the Illustrated Police 
News. That was to be expected : 

The dog that's lame is much to blame. 

The editor of the Police News said in his letter to 
the Times : " If a picture representing the Alton 
tragedy acted as an incentive to the commission of 
crime, in an equal degree did the book to which the 
prisoner alludes in the following passage : 6 1 had a 
book about Cain and Abel in my dinner-basket; 
that book was given me by my grandfather just 
before he died.'" Nevertheless, this editor, wincing 
under public censure, promises to be more cautious 



i 3 8 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



in future. But has any disseminator of the Bible 
shown similar compunction ? Is not the Bible 
Society as busy to-day as ever taking care that 
wherever there is a Mobbs he shall have the story 
of Cain and Abel in his dinner-basket ? Are not 
Earls, Dukes, Lords, and Members of Parliament 
— even such friends of the working man as Thomas 
Hughes — declaring that " for the children of the 
Empire an essential" shall be that they shall be 
taught to read and regard as the Word of God a 
book which contains stories so gross, sensual, and 
cruel, that if they were contained in any other book 
the police would make a raid upon the book-shop 
where it was sold? The Judge who sentenced 
Mobbs told him he was instigated to commit his 
crime by the Devil. Mobbs, about to die, says one 
instigator of his crime was the fourth chapter of 
Genesis. But a legion of Mobbses studying 
murder from the pages of the Bible cannot move 
the Idol, in obedience to which we are taxed 
to place the stories of Cain and Abel, Joseph and 
Potiphar's wife, Lot and his daughters, Jael and 
Sisera, David and Uriah, Solomon with his 700 
wives and 300 concubines, and a hundred other 
atrocities, into the hands of apprentices, prisoners^ 
and little boys and girls. 

Alas for our children ! The stony Idol is un- 
moved by the accumulated evidence that the school- 
children ignore what is pure and beautiful in the 



VIA CRUCIS. 



139 



Bible, — that being as far beyond their young expe- 
rience as Kant's metaphysics are beyond their intel- 
ligence, — and dwell upon the stories they can 
comprehend. Millions of hearts and minds first 
soiled by contact with these obscene pages are 
offered by each generation as a holocaust to the 
Idol of Christendom. We notice the more salient 
instances, but the whole case can alone be appre- 
ciated if we remember that, where hearts fall before 
temptations which others withstand, it implies a 
secret moral decay at work beforehand. The 
weakening of moral forces in human beings through 
the perusal of the Bible in early life proceeds 
during an age not easily subjected to scrutiny by 
themselves or others ; but no one who remembers 
his or her school-days can fail to recall scandals of 
a kind that have hardly names, much less reports in 
detail, outside of that book. Is not this human 
sacrifice ? 

What has the Bible done for the people who, 
as the Earl said, "in ninety-nine cases out of a 
hundred" find there their only religion? It has 
been the text-book of the oppressor in every age. 
It has murdered thousands of innocent people with 
its sentence, " Thou shalt not suffer a witch to 
live." It binds millions to-clay under the tyrant's 
foot with its commands : " Obey the magistrate ;" 
" Obey them that have the rule over you, and 
submit yourselves ;" " Kesis't not evil." In America, 



140 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 

slavery reigned for two generations from a throne 
formed out of the Bible, which showed Jehovah 
proclaiming a slave-code from Sinai, and Paul 
aiding slave- hunters, admonishing slaves, even if 
they could be free, to prefer their chains, and fur- 
nishing the motto of the slave-driver, " Servants, 
obey your masters." Abolitionism arose in America 
contemporaneously with heresy ; it was pioneered 
by unbelievers in the authority of the Bible ; and 
the last link to yield in the slave's chain was the 
link forged by that book. 

The world had to wait for a government founded 
on the equality and freedom of mankind until such 
infidels as Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, and , Adams 
came into power; and when that government was 
corrupted by the Mosaic and Patriarchal institution 
of Slavery, four millions of negroes had to await 
the rule of a President who early in life wrote an 
essay advocating the religious opinions of Thomas 
Paine, and who, when besought on the hustings to 
deny a charge of infidelity brought against him, 
said he "would die first," and admitted that he 
was not a believer in Christianity. A friend of 
President Lincoln stole and burnt his essay on 
Infidelity (1835), but the world does not need it to 
know that the Edict of Emancipation could not, 
any more than the Declaration of Independence, 
have been the work of a believer in the Bible. The 
author of the Life of Jesus told me, as I walked 



VIA CRUCIS. 



141 



with him on the banks of the Neckar, that he was 
originally induced to write that work by the con- 
viction that Germany could never be free so long 
as the people believed in Supernaturalism. A 
people, he said, who have an authority acting 
above, and not through, their faculties, are so far 
intellectually paralysed. They are in the power of 
an idol, and can be easily overawed by it ; when it 
is held up, the common sense goes out of them, and 
they will yield rights which no earthly power, 
unaided by superstition, could extort from them. 

How is it in England ? Are the faculties of the 
people acting healthily ? The English people have 
a love of truth ; yet even after the Convocation of 
Bishops has been forced to admit that the English 
version of the Bible contains thousands of errors of 
translation, it is possible for eminent personages to 
resist the correction of those errors by raising 
fears that the place of the book in the popular 
veneration may not survive any alteration of its 
words ! The English people have a strong sense of 
justice ; yet so paralysed is it in the presence of 
the Bible, that they are ready to compel those 
who believe that book to be one the worst possible 
for children, to furnish money to distribute it 
among their neighbours' children. Mr, Mill must 
pay to have the children of the poor taught that 
there is an eternal hell and devils; Sir Charles 
Lyell circulates the view that the world was made 



1 4 2 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



in six days; Professor Huxley is affirming to the 
working classes the striking piece of palaeontology 
that in the time of Balaam there was a talking ass ! 
Were there no idol in the case, would the English 
people, at the end of so many centuries of struggle 
for the rights of conscience, sacrifice those rights, so 
far as they belong to the freethinking minority, 
and force them to contribute to the dissemination of 
what they hold to be great and dangerous error ? 

I have told of the crocodile devouring the Hindoo 
child, and of the four English children thrown by 
their Christian parents into the jaws of death, and 
these fearful child-sacrifices may seem very far from 
our own homes. But there are sacrifices and 
sacrifices, and there are few homes in Christendom 
wherein, in some form or other, the children are 
not victims of the Bible. To a royal sensualist, 
called in that book the wisest of men, is attributed 
the proverb, " Spare the rod and spoil the child." 
That sentiment has been the cause of more cruelty to 
childhood, wrong to human nature, and bad train- 
ing, — it has made more cowardly, deceitful, sneak- 
ing men and women, — than any other sentiment 
ever uttered. Entering every school and every 
home with the authority of a divine command, 
the rod has appealed to the meanest motives, and 
fostered every animalism. The child's will must be 
broken. But why not break its back ? You would 
make the child a facsimile of yourself; you will 



VIA CRUCIS. 



43 



" bring down its spirit" to your own level, and teach 
it that the evil of wrong is physical suffering, and 
that the beauty of holiness is a sugar-plum ; and yet 
perhaps you wonder that the world is so full of sly 
and selfish people ! It is true, indeed, that some grow 
to be noble and manly despite the rod, for broken 
wills can sometimes knit like brokeu bones ; but on 
many faces that are mere ciphers appended to the 
real figures of the world, — foreheads that are 
but the graves of individual minds, — the wise are 
reading the monition, Spare the child and spoil the 
rod. 

To this dreary list of sacrifices offered up to 
the Idol must be added the Bible itself. Invalu- 
able as a record of the early life, the superstitions 
and aspirations, the heroisms and speculations of 
mankind, the student may find here the most com- 
plete and rounded chapter of his own biography. 
Taken not as food but as facts, there is use for the 
faults and follies it records, as well as for its true 
thoughts — even as in nature the poisons have their 
place as well as the fruits. But regarded as an 
authority over the reason, which alone can read it 
discriminatingly, the light that is in it is turned to 
darkness : its prophets are made to veil their own 
visions as reflected in ours, and men whose excel- 
lence consisted in confronting the popular creed, 
and refusing to kneel to the conventional idols, are 
quoted to make men servile and timid before the 



144 EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



synagogues, and faithless to the great inspirations 
and scriptures, of their own day. 

Such is the religion which finds in Good Friday 
its most solemn fast, and in a human sacrifice its 
central idea. But across the darkness of the day, 
which symbolises the ignoble sacrifice of us all, there 
was this year one gleam of light. At the Crystal 
Palace, some thousands of people collected and 
played " Kiss-in-the-Ring " all day. Some anti- 
quaries tell us that the game may have been an 
ancient pagan rite or festival. Possibly the merry- 
makers at the Crystal Palace were unconsciously 
celebrating some prehistoric " Good Freyja's day." 
It is a reminder that all gods must die ; and the 
eye of faith may look forward to a future when the 
solemnities of Good Friday will have become sports, 
and its associations, including the Stations of the 
Cross, call for archaeological ingenuity. 



XI. 



Every prophet whom I send goeth forth to establish religion, 
not to root it up. 

Thou wilt be asked, " By what dost thou know God ?" Say, " By 
that which descendeth upon the heart;" for could that be proved 
false, souls would be utterly helpless. There is in thy soul a certain 
knowledge, before which, if thou display it to mankind, they will 
tremble like a branch agitated by the strong wind. 

Sasan. 



Devoutly look, and nought 

But wonders shall pass by thee ; 

Devoutly read, and then 

All books shall edify thee ; 

Devoutly speak, and men 

Devoutly listen to thee ; 

Devoutly act, and then 

The strength of God acts through thee. 

Ruckert ( Wisdom of the Brahmin). 



PENTECOST. 



mm 



MADE my way to the door of the Arch- 
bishop's palace, meaning to attend a great 
Congress of Bishops therein convened from 
all parts of the world. An individual in livery at 
the door could not find on his list of delegates the See 
I represented, and refused me admission. There- 
fore I was fain to sit by the gate, and observe the 
prelates as they passed in. I could but think them 
the successors of those divines whom Milton called 
the sumptuously-cared-for " dividual movable" re- 
ligions of the well-to-do people of his day, and they 
had been evidently "better breakfasted than he 
whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on 
green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem." As I 
looked, I saw ten thousand pounds walk in, and 
after him seven thousand, five thousand, and other 
goodly and portly figures. So far as I could see, 
the chapel they entered differed in some respects 
from the hill-sides and the fish-boats of Jerusa- 
lem and Galilee. And though one or two seemed 



148 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



heavily weighted with Colenso, whatever crosses 
they had seemed hardly heavy enough to make 
them faint. 

After they had all gone in I listened, and, 
though the words were not easily distinguishable, 
they seemed, as intoned, to be : " We have done 
those things which we ought to have done, and have 
left undone those things that we ought to have left 
undone, and are altogether in the soundest condi- 
tion." I may have mistaken the exact words used, 
but the tone was unmistakable. I also heard 
" Lord ! Lord !" repeated many times. Soon after, 
I read a Pastoral Address which these Bishops had 
put forth. Every phrase in it was borrowed from 
ancient prophets and apostles, who, fortunately 
for our knowledge of them and their sayings, did 
not go quite so far back from their own times for 
language or thoughts with which to appeal to the 
people around them. No doubt there were in Paul's 
day prelates who addressed men in the phrases, and 
appealed to them against the sins, of fossil genera- 
tions ; but we know as little about them as posterity 
will know of the Bishops whom the late Archbishop 
of Canterbury convened in London. 

Weary at last of sitting before the closed doors 
of the archiepiscopal palace, and the night coming 
on, I bent my steps to a dismal little room in the 
City, where had been called a meeting of Free- 
thinkers. They were one and all poor people, 



PENTECOST. 



149 



many of them artisans. Some of them had seen 
the insides of prisons in the days when that was 
the answer of the Prince Regent to those who 
questioned whether he were Adonis and Maecenas 
blended in one, or the argument of the Church to 
those who circulated Paine's Age of Reason. These 
aged ones here counted over their scars, recognised 
their triumphs, and handed their old flag — the 
prouder for its tatters — to the young who sat 
around them. There was brought in an aged 
woman who had witnessed the struggles of exe- 
crated infidels, and her dim eyes spoke, though 
her tongue could not, her Nunc dimittis. It was 
enough that Englishmen could think and utter 
their thoughts, could read and write, without fear. 
There were young men, and young women too, 
who rose and consecrated themselves with burning 
words to lives of devotion to " the Cause." Higher 
and higher came the tide of feeling ; it overflowed 
in the tears of eyes happy with the vision of a 
liberated England; it swelled in eloquent speech, 
under which all bent as branches under a strong 
wind. Here was enthusiasm, devoutness, joy! 

It was revealed to me in that moment that I sat 
with the followers of Moses, singing their songs in 
the Wilderness ; with the first disciples of Ahmed, 
kneeling in the desert with eyes uplifted to the 
one Allah, before whom every idol must fall; with 
those who pressed out into the wilderness to listen 



1 50 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



to one clothed in camel's hair, who proclaimed the axe 
laid to the root of the tree. I knew this ancient 
fire kindling every eye, touching every tongue. It 
had burnt on altars through the long night of 
superstition ; it had burnt in the unconsumed bush 
before Moses, and enveloped the burning mountain 
where Zoroaster stood ; it had been kept by Vestals 
through temples long crumbled; Phoenixes had 
passed through it to renewed life ; Prometheus had 
brought it from heaven to deify men ; it had lighted 
Isis in her search for Osiris, and Demeter in her 
wanderings after Persephone ; it had lit up the star 
of Bethlehem; it had flashed its lightnings from 
Sinai to Calvary; it had descended in cloven 
tongues on Galilean fishermen, and raised them to 
be apostles. And even as I detected the old, old 
fire in its new manifestation, behold, there entered 
in that meeting of infidels one with shining face, 
who said : " To-day have I wandered through 
London to find my mother, my sister, my brother. 
I sought them first among those who preside over 
the Church called after my name. But I knew 
them not. They on their cushions knew not me 
in my carpenter's garb, but suspended their cries of 
' Lord ! Lord !' until I could be put out. Then, as 
I passed by this room, I heard some at the door 
denouncing those within as i infidels,' e agitators,' 
f heretics.' The familiarity of those phrases in old 
days led me to enter. And though you will not 



PENTECOST. 



name my name, I read it on your foreheads ; though 
you despise the gilded crosses of Churches, I see on 
each a heavier cross than any Christian has to bear 
in these days. I am content. He is not my brother 
who names my name, but he who will give his 
life to mankind. Take my hand, 0 my brothers, 
my sisters ; for ye too wear thorns for crowns. My 
peace is yours, my joy is on your countenances. 
Ye are children of the Holy Ghost, for the Spirit 
of the Age is to each age its holiest breath, and 
special revelation. Your differences are nothing, 
your errors but little, in the presence of this breath 
which unites and inspires you to maintain the rights 
of Humanity, the sanctity of reason, the liberty of 
thought, and this high faith in the destiny of man to 
rise above all that afflicts and degrades him." 



XII, 



BUNHILL FIELDS. 



Every drop of his blood had eyes that looked downward. He 
knew the heroes of 1776, but could not recognise those of to-day 
when he met them in the street. 

Emerson on Daniel Webster. 

There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to 
revenge any wrong ; but delights to endure all things, in hope to 
enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and con- 
tention, and to weary out all exultation and cruelty, or whatever is 
of a nature contrary to itself. I found it alone, being forsaken. I 
have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate 
places of the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection, 
and eternal holy life. 

James Naylor. 

Set not thy foot on graves ; 

Care not to strip the dead 

Of his sad ornament, 

His myrrh, and wine, and rings, 

His sheet of lead, 

And trophies buried : 

Go, get them where he earned them when alive, — 
As resolutely dig or dive. 

Emerson. 



BUNHILL FIELDS. 



mm. 



NDER the gray October sky I started forth 
to witness the formal re-opening of Bunhill, 
or Bone-hill, Cemetery. I passed by the 
spot where Cromwell after death hung on the 
gallows ; by the old fields where the martyrs died, 
but where now the stately market stands ; by the 
house where Milton was born, possibly by that where 
he hid himself from the wrath of the Restoration. 
" Milton, thou shouldst have lived to see this hour," 
when my Lord Mayor, and my Lord Shaftesbury, 
and Members of Parliament, and noted Clergymen, 
are coming together to compete for the best eulogy 
and profoundest homage to the men whom their 
predecessors hunted to their graves. 

Around the vacant space in the centre of the 
great city huge factories stood roaring at their 
work. Their brick walls and bio; si^ns frowned 
upon the vacant ground, seeming to say, " Why is 
this waste? This parcel of ground, with its idle 
grave-stones, might at this moment be coining 



i 5 6 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



millions of pounds." But the commerce of London, 
surging up against the confines of the silent field, 
was there restrained as by a spell. Commerce had 
indeed made an effort to appropriate that ground, 
but had heard the command, Thus far, and no 
farther. The religious hearts of England had 
gathered round it, and formed a sacred circle 
which no pecuniary interests could overpass. And 
the silence of this field loudest chanted the requiem 
of those whose bones moulder in it. For here rest 
men and women who, while living, similarly with- 
stood those potent interests which recoil before their 
dust, when self-interest said to them, Sell us 
your souls ; do not stand by a faith which brings you 
only a crust of bread ; give up those idle visions which 
are carrying you into prisons; take sides with us, 
and we will load your tables with plenty ! The 
sacred circle in their breasts, whose walls did not 
then fall before such interests, finds its fit monu- 
ment in the silent sanctity of Bunhill Fields, 
and in the sentiment which still finds something 
more useful than gold. The Unitarian Lord Mayor, 
the Nonconformist Member of Parliament, and the 
Nobleman of the Church of England, utter in 
accord the homage of the hour. Not one of them, 
it may be, believes the dogmas of Wesley, or Watts, 
or George Fox, or Lardner, or Defoe, or Bunyan ; 
yet alike they bow before these mighty shades. 
For it is only in the present, where personal 



BUNHILL FIELDS. 



157 



interests or prejudices are affected, that men raise 
their little creeds above essential nobleness and 
moral grandeur. 

The ceremony was over. About one tomb 
especially the crowd gathered. On it lay the carved 
figure of John Bunyan. On one side is a picture 
of the pilgrim with his staff toiling under his 
burden ; on the other, the burden has rolled off as 
he clasps the foot of the cross. It bears an inscrip- 
tion showing that it has been of late repaired under 
the presidency of an Earl whom I need not name. 
The same nobleman was good enough to patronise 
the Pilgrim in his address on the same day ; he 
called the old tinker, with gracious familiarity, i( a 
glorious old fellow." One was forced to reflect 
how different he was from the Earls who in old 
times conceived that the best place for Bunyan was 
Bedford Gaol. When the nobleman left I was fain 
to follow him, and the first thing he did was to pick 
up a hard stone and fling it at a man walking a little 
before him. The man turned : could I believe my 
eyes ? — it was John Bunyan ! The noble lord not 
only stoned this pilgrim, but called on the clergymen 
around him to do the same ; and many of them did 
so. Wounded, the poor man went on his way, until, 
at last, he fainted. I followed, and asked him his name ; 
but even as I did so, though the likeness to Bunyan 
remained, I saw that it was a certain heretical Bishop. 

Returning again to the sepulchre garnished 



158 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



with the nobleman's name, with his denunciations 
of those who stoned the prophets of England still 
ringing in my ears, I sat down, alone now, before 
the tomb. cc Alas ! " I cried, " can men see the 
true and great only when their names are traced in 
dust ? Shall we for ever go on raising the crosses 
of the past over our churches, and crucifying the 
sacred causes of to-day ? It is easy to praise the 
Bunyans of three centuries ago ; but how about 
their true brothers whom we meet in the street? 
When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith 
in the earth ? or would not the very men who now 
worship his name crucify him, even as they crucify 
every sacred human cause which represents him ?" 

The lips of the stone figure seemed to smile 
with their old serenity, and the voice said, with 
a meaning gathered out of the intervening cen- 
turies, e( Steadily believe concerning the things 
that are invisible." 

I listened for some further word. Whether it 
was the whispering of the wind, or the hum of 
looms, or fancy's coinage of the voices in the street, 
it seemed as if there came to me, as I sat there, 
these words : — 

" Yes, steadily believe and endure as seeing the 
invisible. There never was heroism, nor martyr- 
dom, nor saintly devotion, which is not now dis- 
coverable in every part of the earth. Their sacred 
camp is ever near. Where the scholar is devoting 



BUN HILL FIELDS. 



159 



his life to rescue the weak and ignorant; where 
the thinker gives his hand to the undowered 
cause of a hated truth; where the man of Science 
follows Nature with a faithful love, which refuses 
to divide its loyalty with superstition, what- 
ever the bribe; where in loneliness, with courage 
and devotion, the gifted and the true are pursuing, 
amid doubt and misgiving, over crag and torrent, 
the Truth that has called to them, — there, be thou 
sure, are Bunyans, and Miltons, and Knoxes, and 
the next pilgrims in the procession of faithful souls 
that can never end. But do thou hasten hence. 
Not by the kissing of their bones, or the garnishing 
of their tombs, or the believing of their creeds, can 
the brave and free be honoured; but by an in- 
dependence and fidelity like their own. He is 
most like Christ who stands as bravely before his 
Church (so called) as Christ did before the conven- 
tional creeds of his day. Rise and go hence ; seek 
not to live by substituting for virtue of your own 
the praises of others' virtues ; borrow not their oil 
for your lamp ; heed thine own aim." 




XIII. 



THE OLD TABARD 



0 thou who towerest above the flights of conjecture, opinion, 
and comprehension, whatever has been reported of thee we have 
heard and read ; the congregation is dismissed, and life drawn to a 
close, — and we still rest in our first encomium of thee. 

Saadi, 



Nor times shall lack when, while the work it plies, 
Unsummoned powers the blinding film shall part, 

And, scarce by happy tears made dim, the eyes 
In recognition start ! 

Clough. 




m 



THE OLD TABARD. 

HE Pilgrims of Chaucer's time, who started 
from their old inn in Southwark to have 
their several aches and ailments healed at 
the shrine of St. Thomas in Canterbury, little knew 
how far they would journey in time. The trans- 
figuring power of poetry, which of old raised 
earthly heroes into constellations, has set them 
among the galaxies of Westminster Abbey, where, 
from their beautiful window, they look down upon 
our generation to remind it that the faith of one age 
is happy if it can become the artistic decoration of 
the ages that follow. What the faded picture on 
board still preserved over the door of the old house 
standing where the Tabard stood — on which one 
could some years ago detect a horse's and, it may 
be, a pilgrim's head — is to the memorial window 
erected by the Dean of Westminster, so is the faith 
of those who sought the shrine of St. Thomas to 
that of the preacher in whom the ancient Abbey 
climbs to its last century-blossom. Sitting in the 
light of that glass, passionate with saintly forms, I 



1 64 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 

listened to the far-reaching words of the preacher. 
They were alive with the pulses of the present. 
" Were a man to imitate with literal exactness the 
personal life of Christ, he would be living an es- 
sentially unchristian life. We must minister to 
the exigencies and needs of our own time in the 
spirit which animated Christ in his dealings with 
his time." " When Jesus was on earth, he said to 
his disciples, ( Ye believe in God, believe also in 
me ;' were he now living, he would probably have 
to say, c Ye believe in me, believe also in God.' " 
From his shining exaltation Chaucer responded, 
" Truth shall thee deliver, 'tis no drede." But the 
responses of those who sat in the seats, so far as 
their faces expressed them, seemed very different. 
Sitting with their Prayer-books before them, with 
dull formality, the majority of them were evidently 
listening to the preacher's surplice. In the dim 
light of the Abbey his words took the shapes of the 
tombs and arches ; and if he had declared himself 
an atheist, — in his ingenious way, — -I verily believe 
it could have startled few, but must have entered 
the ears of those about him as a devout expression 
of faith. For the present the Prayer-book, and 
the traditions with which he is invested, are too 
strong for him. Even the light of a burning dia- 
mond is lost if set under a bushel. May his golden 
candlestick be removed into its place, where the 
eyes that long for it may rejoice in its light ! 



THE OLD TABARD. 



165 



111 the tap-room of the Tabard there was a 
collection of working people eating their noon-day 
meal of cheese or sausages and drinking beer. 
There were eight or ten men and three or four 
women, to whose conversation I listened, as I 
awaited the leisure of the publican to take me 
through the more ancient inn near by. They were 
discussing the existence of God. I took my notes 
carefully, and they are as follows : — 

A. — "I don't say there be no God; I only say 
I don't see any signs of him. Look at the vice and 
misery in Lunnun. I think, if you or I was om- 
niscient and omnipotent, we'd soon manage to put a 
stop to some things going on in Lunnun." 

B. — " But wat do you V I know about Lun- 
nun, and wat's good for it ? It's like people pray- 
ing about the weather; one wants rain, t'other 
shine : one man's meat's another man's pizen." 

A. — " Yes, that may be so about the misery, — 
we mayn't know what's good for people ; but we do 
know that murder an' thievery an' all that ain't 
good fur nobody. Ef God made the world, seems 
as ef he put as much bad as good into it." 

C. — " But God made man a free agent, and so 
he had to let him be bad if he liked." 

A. — " Yes ; but ef he's all-knowin', he must 
'ave known when he sent a man into the world 
whether the man was a-goin' to commit murder ; and 
ef he sent him here knowin' that, whose fault is it ?" 



1 66 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 

D. — " All that's what we don't none of us know 
nothin' at all about." 

A. — " That's just what I say. So, when a 
feller tells me about God, I say he's tellin' me 
what he knows nothin' about." 

E. — "Well, I'll tell you what I think. So 
long as a man is well 'n' 'earty, he may go on 
thinking what he pleases about God or no God. 
But what does he say when he's brought down on 
his back, groanin' with pain ? Says he, ( Lord, 
have mercy upon me !' " 

F. — " Yes, he may say so as often as he pleases, 
but he'll go on groanin' jest the same, unlest the 
doctor can do somethin' fur ? im. A good many 
people have said, ( Lord, have mercy !' but they V 
their child'n go on a-dyin' all the same." 

The last speaker was an aged white-haired man, 
and his eyes twinkled like steel. His hard saying 
was followed by an ominous silencec He had 
dropped his seed into a soil too congenial, made up 
as it was of weary struggles with poverty and pain, 
not to give it root. Since the days when Chaucer's 
Pilgrims went to Canterbury to have their ailments 
healed by touching shrines, how many tears have 
flowed unheeded, how many sighs received no pity, 
how many prayers remained unanswered ! A long 
pilgrimage it has been from St. Thomas's shrine to 
the desolate denials mingling with the beer and 
sausages of the Tabard of to-day. In how many 



THE OLD TABARD. 



6- 



lowly rooms — for it is no fancy sketch I have given 
— are such conversations going on ? — one, it may 
be safely affirmed, for every pulpit which instructs 
the poor amid their sorrows to believe that there is 
a God who may and can relieve those sorrows if 
they shall pray to him sufficiently. Many aching- 
bones must have returned from idle pilgrimages to 
Canteibury ere an English king could have carted 
its shrhes to their dust-holes ; and if other invisible 
shrines .re disappearing from the faith of the people, 
it is beause every dogma concerning them is 
proved Use by millions of lives each day. Our 
Churche&are busy sowing Atheism. 

Could I be mistaken in thinking that this was 
the audience, rather than that in the Abbey, to 
which theoreacher I heard there was really com- 
missioned? They sat there in gloom, the chill of 
scepticism ipon them, awaiting him. He did not 
come. Mu& they, then, go out again to their work 
and their ditaal lot, unsunned by any higher faith 
or hope ? At his moment one who had remained in 
a corner silent and cloaked, advanced and spoke: — 
" Had I b^n an atheist when I entered this 
room, my broths, I have heard enough to prove 
to me the exisince of God, and that chiefly from 
those who have mbted or denied that existence — 
as they may sujose; for what they have denied 
is not God, butcertain fancies concerning him, 
each, no doubt, oiome value in its day, set up by 



i68 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



men, and made into idols by their followers. When 
Montalembert accused Proudhon of atheism, the 
latter justly replied, s If not to believe :n M. 
Montalembert's god constitute an atheist, I am 
one.' And thus it is when the Churches have 
brought before you a god as the Supreme Mechanic 
who created a Universe which there is no .'eason 
to suppose was ever created; or a god wh> rules 
men with an eternal hell for threat, and a rose- 
water heaven for reward; or a god who vishes to 
be flattered by glorifications ; or a god whj can be 
induced to suspend the laws of nature, andraise the 
dead, or save you from disease and poverf ; — your 
rejection of such deities is a rejection >f human 
speculations only. But is there noting in your 
very rejection of these idols of dojma which 
suggests a true God? You reject themjl conceive, 
because they come in collision with y/ir common 
sense and your common feeling; thats 5 you have 
within you a standard which such gods d not come up 
to, — an ideal they shock. No father d mother here 
would treat a child as God is said tc/reat men and 
women — loading them with sorroi surrounding 
them with evil and temptation, an/' punishing the 
millions for their inevitable sins ffot to sj^eak of 
sins they never committed) with /terminable and 
purposeless tortures. But thus yoyfcestify to certain 
great elements in this Universe ^hich cannot be 
left out of this question. What /out this mother's 



THE OLD TABARD. 



69 



heart ? Whence comes it ? Millions on millions of 
mothers are at this moment wearing out their lives 
for their children. This love is the same in every 
one of them. Might we not safely say that there is 
a great mother-principle, an element of love, per- 
vading this Universe ? 

" Again : I speak to you, and you understand 
me, because I appeal to something in you which is 
also in me — call it our common sense or our 
common reason, which you will; it means that 
thought is the same in us all. All men in the 
world who are not idiots will see together that two 
and two make four; and every thing that can be 
equally proved will command the assent of all intel- 
ligences. May we not, then, add to the love-prin- 
ciple in the Universe a thought-principle also ? 

Ci Now, you may feel a difficulty here. Admit- 
ting that there is a love and a law of reason com- 
mon to mankind, what evidence is there that either 
exists outside of men and women ? Maternal love 
may be the sum- total of the hearts of mothers, 
and universal reason the sum of human thoughts. 

" To this I answer, that everything else about 
us refers to a larger quantity of the same outside of 
us. The body of man is an epitome of the world 
he lives in. Is there limestone in our bones ? 
— there are great strata of the same in the earth. 
Is there iron in the blood ? — it stretches through the 
planet, — nay, as we are beginning to see, through 



170 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 

many planets. It is the same with all the chemic 
elements of which we are composed. They are not 
exhausted by the sum of animal forms, but are 
universal constituents. But if feeling and reason 
are as definitely parts of us as bone and blood, why 
should we not equally conclude that these are re- 
ferable to vast outlying elements of the same per- 
vading the Universe ? 

"In this world, organs and their functions 
everywhere report and represent the elements sur- 
rounding them. The fin implies water : the wing 
implies air; find an eye, — there must be light. 
Fathom with a microscope the vast depths of 
a rain-drop, and you shall find every zoophyte in 
the little globe environed by just the elements 
which are needed for its day of life. Each organ 
corresponds with an outer law, as hook to eye. 
When we rise in the scale of form until we come to 
the higher elements of human nature, shall we con- 
clude that for the first time this harmony is broken 
— that here is an intellectual eye, but no light ; 
here a spiritual ear, but no sound to reply to it ? 

" The Supreme Reason is not what we make it ; 
it makes us what it will. The discoverer does not 
find in the heavens or the earth the reflection of his 
own notions; he finds there intelligent laws, 
which set aside and reverse the crude theories of 
men ; and like Kepler he cries, ( Great Grod, I think 
thy thoughts after thee !' Not all the suffrages of 



THE OLD TABARD. 



171 



mankind could make the three angles of a triangle 
equal to three right angles. Your own scepticisms 
show that the facts of the human heart and brain 
cannot be dogmatised down. Not any more can 
they be scoffed down. Voltaire said : i Whether or 
not God made man in his own image, it is very 
certain man has made God in his image.' It is 
even so : from my feeble thought I trace the 
Universal Thought; listening to my best heart, I 
hear the beat of an Infinite Heart. 

" But when I go beyond this, and try to explain 
how these invisible elements are related to the ex- 
ternal world, or how they consist with the discords 
and evils of society, I am warned that I have not 
yet learned the relation of my thought or feeling 
to my own body. We have not yet learned the 
alphabet of that science whose last problem so 
many parsons are ready to explain with glibness. 
Poor William Blake once declared that on walking 
down a lane he had touched the sky with his stick. 
Our churches and chapels are full of preachers who 
have evidently done the same to their sky. Omni- 
science is the commonplace attribute of barbarous 
religions. But the age of Thought is reticent, and, 
when pressed to speak, asks with Confucius, e Do 
heaven and earth speak ? ' Man has been defined as 
the talking animal ; but rather he is the being who 
in great emergencies can, like the sheep before his 
shearers, be dumb ; and who, amid the squeak and 



172 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE, 



chatter concerning the unknowable, opens not his 
mouth. 

" Yet will I not admit that my truth is unpro- 
ductive. It is something that above and through 
the darkness a tender eye is watching, akin to 
yours, friend, as you look on those you love. Your 
child may be even beyond your power to help ; still, 
it is something that you sit there with soothing 
hand and loving voice. And if this be sustaining 
amid the grief and evil of our lives, it is a yet more 
positive and practical good that our minds and 
hearts may find traced in themselves the presence 
of the great laws around them by which they may 
work to sure success. It is the blending of some 
faculty with a universal power which insures every 
real result. There must be a vital principle in the 
individual, or the greatest power without will be 
unavailing : the same light which will lead a seed 
to its flower will shine on the rock and leave it 
still a rock after a thousand years. On the other 
hand, without the light, the seed will remain a seed 
for a thousand years. Man must bring his private 
power into cooperation with the great laws, or his 
work will be inadequate. What is the human 
hand, with all its cunning, compared with the same 
hand wedded to the laws of steam or electricity ? 

" There is a law in every heart in the Universe 
responsive to the benevolence of a human being. 
There is an order in every atom, every planet, 



THE OLD TABARD. 



173 



related to the constitution of the human mind. 
Each individual task has a public end, and it is 
environed by laws and forces by whose aid alone it 
can be accomplished. To each man that work is 
worship, that end his only attainable deity. By it 
he is uplifted ; it must represent to him the strength, 
the beauty, and the joy of God. Loving that, he 
will love God. If he obey the supreme law of his 
own being, it matters not whether he define him- 
self as atheist or theist. Other gods are the gods 
of the dead — of John, Paul, Chrysostom, Calvin; 
this is the God of the living. We cannot live 
on the bread that was sown and harvested in 
ancient Greece or Palestine. Nature still blooms 
with the unfailing power that gives corn and wine 
to every creature. 

" And it is because of this that Humility is the 
root of all virtues. A man may have many faults, 
and yet do well ; but if he have no humility he can 
never rise to the height of his own ideal — nay, his 
ideal will fade out. How oreat is that darkness ! 
Self-assertion, egotism, conceit, pride, — these are 
the deadly enemies of the true and faithful life ; 
and this because they prevent a man seeing that 
his excellence is not in his individual will, but in 
the great principles without which he is nothing. 
Remove man from the great moral forces, — truth, 
justice, love, knowledge, — and there is not a bird 
feeding its young but is a nobler object than he. 



174 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



His nobility above all things is that for him there is 
a door opening on the divine currents : he enters it 
a beggar ; he stands there a prince. But what is a 
man whose aim is self-centred? — a candle never 
touched with light, a stone never fitted in any wall, 
but left in the path as a danger. Humility is the 
condition of strength because it combats the weak- 
ness of eccentricity and isolation, and raises man to 
the circle of unfailing forces. He will hold all he 
has subordinate to the great aim. In this lowliness 
is born the transfigured self-esteem, or self-rever- 
ence, and self-reliance. It is necessary that a man 
should reverence the constitution of his own mind, 
because of its relations to the supreme laws of 
which it is an organ. Self-surrendered, he is vic- 
torious ; serving, he rules ; making himself dust, he 
will reach the forces by which the dust climbs to a 
soul in flower or crystal. 

" Now, farewell, my brothers and my sisters. 
May you each know that the highest point of heaven 
is just above you ; that the ladder reaching to it 
rises from your lot, however little ; that there is 
no motto more royal than ( I serve ! ' " 

I had already detected in this speaker my old 
friend the Interpreter. When he had finished, the 
sceptic said : " Friend, will you take a mug of beer 
with me ? " The beer was wretched, but the Inter- 
preter told me he would not have exchanged it for 
finest wine. 



XIV. 



THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST. 



/ 



0 Creator of the essence of supports and stays, 
0 thou who sho merest down benefits, 
0 thou -who formest the heart and the Soul, 
0 Fashioner of forms and shadows ! 

The Soul is a flame from among the flames of the fire of thy 

residence of sovereignty ! 
Tezdan is hid by excess of light. 
He causeth the shadow to fall; 
The Inflamer, who maketh the blood to boil. 

Thy world of forms, the city of bodies, the place of earthly things, is 

long and broad and deep. 
Thou art the Accomplisher of Desires. 
The eyes of purity saw thee by the lustre of thy substance : 
Dark and astounded is he who hath seen thee by the efforts of the 

Intellect. 

The Persian Litany. 

Lift up your heart upon the knees of God ; 
Losing yourself, your smallness and your darkness, 
In his great light who fills and mores the world, 
V^ho hath alone the quiet of perfect motion. 

Sterling. 



THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST. 




WENT to the banquet of the Literary 
Fund, and listened to the speeches of the 
eminent men gathered there. Of them 
all I remember one sentence. A man of science, 
alluding; to the charge urged against science that it 
was cold, said : " Though she freeze me, yet will I 
trust in her." Such was the echo in the nineteenth 
century of the faith of Job. More lately we have 
heard the reply of the Church to the man of science. 
A Dean, who once signalised himself by denouncing 
Shakespeare as a godless play-actor, has further 
adorned his ministry with an anathema on science. 
He declares the men of science to be worse than 
idolaters ; and accuses them of bringing down out 
of the sky, and digging up out of the earth, " evi- 
dences against God." Fancying, no doubt, that he 
is trusting God when he rejects the records of 
Nature, the Dean thanks God he is not like the 
scientific blasphemers, who prefer to believe the 
facts of earth and sky rather than the speculations 
concerning them of a Jew who lived in the infancy 

M 



i 7 8 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



of human knowledge. It did not occur to him to 
inquire why God had stored up evidences against 
himself in his worlds. He would probably be 
amazed and indignant if any one should maintain 
that he who worships a God who has said one thing 
by Moses and the opposite by Nature is really the 
idolater, — the worshipper of an impossible monster. 
All the Deans in England cannot make a disbelief 
in the laws by which we are surrounded anything 
but a disbelief in God himself. All the sentimen- 
talists cannot make a fear of the effects of following 
the truth of Science, whithersoever it may lead, 
other than a distrust of the wisdom organised in 
Nature. Unbelief is none the less hollow because 
masked in respect for some ancient book, nor super- 
stition less heartless because disguised as religious 
sentiment. The man who really believes follows 
that which he believes, fearless of consequences. 
The champions of Liberty said, " Though it cost 
our lives, yet will we stand by Liberty," — and so 
we are free men this day. The Reformer said, 
" Though we die, we will proclaim the Truth," — 
and the prison of the soul lies in fragments around 
us. The man of Science — the truest successor 
of the apostles discoverable in our time — cries: 
*' f Though knowledge destroy every temple ; though 
it shatter my own and my neighbours' creed ; 
though it bring on me the anathemas of Deans; 
though it isolate me, freeze me, — yet, because it is 



THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST. 



179 



knowledge, because it is truth and no lie, I will 
trust in it." And because it has laboured in this 
spirit, Science has unrolled before this age a new 
heaven and a new earth; it has gained some secret 
from every smallest grass-blade and insect; it has 
carried ths light of every star beyond the eye down 
to the deeper eye of intelligent admiration ; it has 
kindled the heart and brain of this generation till 
they illumine as torches a Universe once darkened 
with the shadows of superstition and fear. But for 
the high trustfulness of such, there would be no 
faith left in the earth. 

Nothing is more winning in childhood than its 
trustfulness. Nature has provided that, for many 
years after we are born into this world, everything 
about us shall train in us a spirit of trustfulness 
toward those around us. The babe must clins: to 
its mother without misgiving that her breast will 
cease to nourish and protect it. The growing child 
has accumulated, by long experience of the ten- 
derness watching over it, a fund of confidence on 
which the parents may draw. The love may be 
manifested in disappointment, but the gathering 
tear cannot blind the upward look of filial trust. 
And where a child has been so unhappily trained 
that its faith can only live by indulgence, we feel 
that the chief beauty of childhood has vanished. It 
would seem that the Eternal Love has provided 
that mankind shall pass through the age of help- 



180 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



lessness, in which it must trust others for every 
good, in order that this habit of confidence may be 
engendered ; so that when in after years the pa- 
rental providence has been withdrawn, and man 
must trust his own arm for earthly good, he may 
the more readily feel after and find the pervading 
principle of which parental love is the highest 
earthly manifestation. The history of the race is 
a steadfast advance toward the conception of a 
parental Deity. 

The theological representation of this spirit of 
trust is its deformity. It is as if a child should 
make the father's care a reason for reckless- 
ness. It is the fatalism of Egypt, which permits 
the birds to prey on the corn, the beasts on the 
people, and filth to accumulate, in deference to the 
will of Allah. Our missionaries do but carry the 
ruins of Christ's faith to the ruins of Mohammed's. 

The healthy development of this spirit is that 
which would say to the people : " To trust God is 
to trust the laws of his universe ; it is to trust your 
own faculties, and the laws of cause and effect. 
You are distrusting him when you accept as his 
providence that which you have power to control. 
The only way to pray for a thing is to work for it 
in accordance with the conditions under which that 
thing is to be attained. Anything else, whatever 
Cant may teach, is the moral indolence which ex- 
pects some god to do your work." 



THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST. 



181 



In the inner world, we are told, we must let the 
hearts and minds of dead Jews declare the creed of 
the Nineteenth Century. The Dean clearly cannot 
see why this age has been given a brain of its own 
at all. " Leave off your investigations," he says to 
the man of science ; " Moses has settled these things 
long ago. You must not trust Reason, but God." 
But this is as if a young man were invited to trust 
Luck instead of Work. The very essence of faith 
is corrupted when a man can be induced to abnegate 
the task of his faculties, and yield his thinking and 
feeling to be done by others. The true doctrine of 
Trust is of endless application. 

Lately, a band of men were gathered together 
at Lausanne, in Switzerland, to consult and con- 
trive that all the nations of Europe might be made 
into a fraternity of peaceful powers, its swords 
beaten into ploughshares, its spears into pruning- 
hooks, its fruitful lands converted into a fair Garden 
of Humanity, where ail should be prosperous and 
all enlightened. The utterances of this group of 
poets and dreamers were received in the outer 
world with mingled pity and mirth. To reach 
Lausanne, they had to pass frontiers bristling with 
bayonets. They had brought their rose -mist under 
the shadows of fortresses. Around them stood 
empires armed to the teeth, glaring upon each 
other. Some of them were exiles forced to cherish 
their Utopias in far-off islands. Around them were 



182 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



selfish rulers, aided by servile agents, sustained by 
ignorant populations. Why should not the world 
smile to see them fanning their little ember amid 
these icebergs, which they proposed to melt into a 
peaceful sea of universal brotherhood ? 

They were engaged in something a little more 
obviously, but not more really, absurd than that 
which is employing every reformer or idealist. The 
League for the education of every English child in 
undenominational schools ; the Secularists trying to 
convince every human being that his or her energies 
belong to an actual, rather than a possible, world ; 
the Socialist who would- secure to each the just 
wage of his work ; the champion of woman who 
demands that her right shall be respected, and that 
our politics shall be refined by her moral genius; 
the Liberal believer who would raise mankind to the 
worship of what is worthy, — all these are bringing 
their several sparks to melt vast and icy institutions 
which represent a winter in the whole sky of 
humanity. What do the kings of the earth care for 
Victor Hugo's prophecies of the good time coming, 
when they feel the congenial atmosphere of the 
season which, were they unmade, would remake 
them, filling the sky ? 

But yet, again, why is it that the dreamers go 
on with their manifestly absurd efforts ? Why do 
the reformers, the freethinkers, go on working 
unweariedly upon the never-yielding worlds be- 



THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST. 



183 



sieging the fortresses of wrong with arrows power- 
less as sunbeams ? 

These are the children of Trust. These endure, 
seeing the invisible, toiling on to the city that hath 
foundations ! 

The farmer sows his seed in full faith that the 
seasons, the dews, the sunshine, will lead them to 
their harvest. He is not dismayed when, after his 
seed-time, snow and ice cover the earth : he has 
reasons for seeing beyond snow and ice. He has 
known many seeds kept safe under all storms, — nay, 
nourished by them, — to wave in triumph at last. 
And these tillers of a more sacred soil know well 
that the law of their seed of truth is also the law of 
that larger seed, the great world. They will trust 
the relationships of the universe against all appear- 
ances of hostility between this and that. They will 
still believe that the world is secretly conspiring with 
the right, and that when emperors are dead and 
temples decayed the old hunger of mankind for 
justice and truth will work on, and the rays and 
rains never fail which shall at last lead every living 
germ to its flower. So, above the laughter of the 
world, I listen to the ^Eolian strain of faith which 
lingers in the earth, bringing the melodies of hearts 
that stood firm to their work through the watches of 
the long night, — the old music, to which atoms 
march and worlds move, — and know well that its 
old power is not exhausted. With it is a subtle 



1 84 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



summer breath, not to be felt by tyrants, trans- 
fusing the frozen air. Dream on, O brothers of 
Lausanne ! no wind blows, but whispers your truth ; 
no sunbeam falls, but reveals it to some eye ; the 
ebbing, flowing tides follow it with fluid steps, and 
the stars in their courses. 

To realms more difficult and shadowy the spirit 
of Trust attends her child, even where the human 
spirit rises with trembling wing to the last verge of 
time, and, looking down the dim vista beyond the 
grave, questions — Whither? We have arrived at 
an age which no longer can, even if it would, trust 
its sacred treasures of hope to the frail and flimsy 
vessels of tradition. To Thought there can be no 
authority but Reason. The world has long trusted 
the determined assertions of immortality so com- 
pletely, that now, when those assertions are ques- 
tioned, it turns out that the human mind has no 
single clear proof of a future existence. Socrates 
gives plausible speculations; Modern Philosophy 
feeds itself with a few probabilities ; while Science 
shows the problem still standing, a Sphynx with 
sealed lips, just beyond the reach of the human 
faculties. But if deep in our own thought and love 
we have caught the lineaments of a Supreme 
Reason ; if, whatever mystery surround the relation 
of that central Intelligence to a world apparently 
unconquered by it, we still see in history the stead- 
fast triumph of moral over brute forces, and armies 



THE DOCTRINE OF TRUST. 



185 



vanquished by ideas, — we have found a truth on 
which man may pillow his head in the darkness. 
It shall not be different — this law — whether it 
affect a soul or a world. Why should I be anxious 
concerning the voyage or the distant shore, if 
Wisdom hold the helm, and the breath of Love fill 
the sail? Shall I realise elsewhere the ideals 
earth has failed to fulfil ? Shall I clasp again the 
kindred hearts parted from me by death? I know 
not. This I know, that the Inspirer of affections, 
the Source of unattained ideals, lives. 

Some of us have already lived long enough to 
prefer annihilation to that eternal Sabbath, passed 
in full sight of the agonies of the damned, which 
once seemed to us the summum pulchrum of immor- 
tality : it may be that we should in a proportionately 
advanced phase of insight equally abhor anything we 
can now conceive as individual immortality, which 
already one philosopher discovers means, as com- 
monly taught, the wearing out of one's old boots in 
some other world. At any rate, 'tis as vain to vex 
our lives with anxieties concerning the unknowable, 
as it were to refuse the food of our own zone 
because it is not the tropical luxury mentioned in 
some traveller's book. 

Confucius said : " The divine spirit which the 
superior man cherishes flows on in equal extent 
with heaven and earth." Trained by the faith in 
the working of good, even where evil seems to 



i86 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



reign; observant of the fires revealed by night, 
and the growths fed by decays ; living for the idea 
which is everywhere resisted, but steadily trium- 
phant, — the man of trust will at least know that 
this Universe is nowhere under the direction of 
Chance or of any Devil; and if he doubt the 
common belief concerning the future, it will be in 
the hope of something transcending it. 



* 



XV. 

ONE VOICE. 



The peculiar nature of the Scholar's occupation consists in this : 
that science, and especially that side of it from which he conceives of 
the whole, shall continually burst forth before him in new and 
fairer forms. Let this fresh spiritual youth never grow old within 
him ; let no form become rigid and fixed ; let each sunrise bring him 
new joy and love in his vocation, and larger views of its significance. 

FlCHTE. 

Through, brothers, through, — this be 
Our watchword in danger or sorrow : 
Com in on clay to its mother dust, 
All nobleness heavenward ! 

Korxee. 



ONE VOICE. 



P 



FOLLOWED the great revolutionary 
thinker of our time to hear him deliver 
his address as Lord Rector of the chief 
Scottish University. On that notable morning I 
saw this severest critic of the people pursued with 
plaudits along the street. The students rose with 
wild enthusiasm to welcome the opponent of all 
they were accustomed to hear from their professors 
and their parents. He stood there, the chief of 
all, a portent of these times. Honoured he was, 
because his path had been marked by no mean 
compliance with the world, — a path as unsullied as 
any that had been trod by the shades of the great 
and faithful which we saw standing by his side. 
But his presence was significant of even more than 
the profound rectitude of the yet unwarped youth 
who, touched with a fine enthusiasm, had called 
him there. 

Amid the confused landmarks of the present 
time, the young are asking with increasing concern. 



190 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



te What shall we do ?" The deluge of inquiry has 
floated the old institutions ; many of them are going 
to pieces, others sinking waterlogged. Life has 
outrun the ancient guides; libraries have become 
fossil thoughts; and we have reached a condition 
somewhat like that which originated our old uni- 
versities, where students gathered to hear what had 
not yet been embodied in books or institutions. 
There is a perception abroad that our living waters 
have left the old channels, and are beginning to 
cut new ones for themselves. And among those 
engaged on the new channels the young men had 
fixed on one of the sincerest, and called on him to 
stand here and justify his work. 

That day I did not envy Palestine or Arabia 
their prophets, nor Germany her reformers ; all 
preceding dawns glowed on this face, all their 
burdens were on this voice, as, with the eloquence 
of perfect conviction, he uttered once more that 
which had been the soul of all his teachings. One 
simple line he has added to the creed of youth. 
Where to the old question, " Who made you ? " 
the child answers, " God ; " this man cries, " O 
child, if God made thee, he meant thee !" Again, 
he insisted that each human being enters this world 
for an assigned task ; that wisdom consists in dis- 
covering it, religion in accomplishing it. All 
reading, all teaching, must be determined by the 
mental hunger rising from it; all worship is 



ONE VOICE. 



191 



humility before it, all joy is to be found at the 
core of it, all sorrow attaches to the infidelity which 
abandons that. 

But is this true ? Does each of the swarming 
millions around us represent some divine thought? 
It is a hard saying. So many seem missent or 
accidentally sent into this over-populated society of 
ours ! We have discovered how to make our 
chimneys consume their smoke ; we can turn 
our garbage to golden grain; but we still go on 
carting men to the gallows or the colonies quite 
helplessly. Yet now and then from their dumb 
ranks some voice comes telling us of a beauty 
hidden beneath their hard animalism, as when 
Ebenezer Elliott's tears hiss unon his anvil, and 
his hammer beats out : — 

Flowers of thy heart, 0 God, are they, — 
Cast thou not them as weeds away, 
Their heritage a winter's day : 

God save the People ! 

Flowers ! What pains have gone into the archi- 
tecture of the humblest daisy ! And is not each 
humble man of more value than many daisies ? 
Are we, in not finding a high use for each human 
being, — in whom dwells a life that defies explana- 
tion, — prone to confuse our ignorance with the 
wisdom in Nature, which has done nothing by 
redundance, inscribing its sign for the intelligent 



192 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



as surely on the wing of a fly as on that of an 
archangel ? 

There is a mystical meaning in that word by 
which each man names his vocation ; it is his calling. 
Something has, then, called to him. Something 
significant, too, there is in each man's sensitiveness 
concerning his calling. The physician is not an- 
noyed when told he cannot build a ship; but the 
wound is deep if he is charged with incompetence 
in his own profession. Then there come to us the 
old monitions of the great : Be thyself ; Know 
thyself ; Look into thy heart, and write ; with 
Chaucer's dying word — 

Eede well thyself, that other folk canst rede. 

We know, too, — the humblest know, — the up-hill 
work of doing what is against the grain of us, and 
the lightness of the labour we love. We know 
how vain it is to try and keep Burns a ploughboy 
— how vain to make poets of those who ought to be 
ploughboys, and whose wooden shoes may be heard 
clattering through all their rhymes. Saul will 
hardly make your herdsman, nor Jesus your car- 
penter; Cimabue is but a poor shepherd, and 
Newton a mere bungler as haberdasher ; George 
Fox and Bohme are not the men you would bid 
stick to their last. It is not arbitrary reversible 
power we are under, but unalterable laws ; and so 
long as there is no life, however obscure, without its 



ONE VOICE. 



193 



ideal, we must heed the man there who has lived 
the word he utters, and believe, indeed, that for 
each there is an appealing task, with which each 
must rise or fall, commissioned to bind or loose on 
earth that which shall in every world be so bound 
or loosed. 

In a church in Venice I saw a representation 
in marble of Jesus at the moment when he cried in 
the synagogue, " The spirit of the Lord is upon 
me." He had been put forward by the priest to do 
one thing — he did quite another and an unexpected 
thing. The artist had put into the young man's 
face a radiance and joy beyond what I had con- 
ceived stone could express. The hair floats back, 
the eye dilates, the face, as it were, blooms under 
the light that has fallen upon it in that moment of 
turning from the prescribed path to the true path. 
He has thrown off the shackles of the synagogue, 
and, clearing the altar like a winged god, appeals 
from the plan of parent and priest to the verdict of 
his own spirit. 

It may be the legends did not comprehend their 
own significance when they gave as that youth's 
first words, " I must be about my Father's busi- 
ness;" and as his last, " It is finished." Between 
the work undertaken and the work finished there 
lay wildernesses of temptation, gardens of agony, 
scourgings and thorn-crowns, but there lay no fal- 
tering of the faithful steps. No visions of tasks 

N 



19 V ^ N EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



declined, no ideals turned by neglect to fierce fallen 
angels, haunted that supreme moment, but only the 
clear response : " Thou hast overcome ; thou hast 
realised thy soul ; thy Father's business with thee 
on earth is finished." 



XVI. 



CROSS ROADS. 



0 gracious Pan, and ye other gods who preside over this place ! 
grant that I may be beautiful within, and that those external things 
which I have may be such as agree with a right internal disposition 
of mind, and that I may account him to be rich who is wise and just. 

Socrates. 

If a man lose his fowls or his dog, he knows how to seek them. 
There are those who lose their hearts, and know not how to seek 
them. The duty of the student is no other than to seek his heart. 
He who employs his whole mind will know his nature. He who 
knows his nature knows Heaven. 

Mencius. 

One who, if he be called upon to face 

Some awful moment, to which Heaven has joined 

Great issues, good or bad for human kind, 

Is happy as a lover, and attired 

With sudden brightness, like a man inspired ; 

And through the heat of conflict keeps the law 

In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw. 

Wordsworth. 



CROSS ROADS. 




WALKED amid the ancient ruins at St. 
Andrew's, seeking to spell out from the 
stones the storms that shaped them, from 
the walls and towers the ages they represent ; and the 
bracing winds from over the sea seemed like the 
strong pure voices of the great out of the past, as 
they might be refined from all that was hard and 
crude, raised into harmony with truths which waves 
and winds repeat. Ah, this sweet benediction of 
death ! this filtration by time of the transient from 
the permanent, so that the true man surely finds his 
place in the great brotherhood of souls not to be 
parted by climes or ages, or the opinions belonging 
to them ! There is no difference : whether it be 
Voltaire or John Knox, the voices of the great 
at last accord in the chant which goes on from age 
to age, while the temples wherein they worshipped, 
or which they assailed, crumble into common 
ruin. It was the spirit of John Knox which sum- 
moned lately the foremost political thinker of 



198 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



England, and afterwards the historian of the age 
of Elizabeth, to represent St. Andrew's University 
and advise its youth. Without these, the brave 
old warriors of independent thought could not be 
made perfect. 

The earnest men thus summoned felt the full 
gravity of the opportunity afforded them. A 
common instinct guided both to address themselves 
to the unwritten chapter of Moral Science, — to the 
Ethics of Intellect. The advance of popular educa- 
tion amid new modes of thought and expression 
makes the theme one of increasing urgency ; and the 
scholar in the vanguard already finds himself steer- 
ing perilously between the Scylla of falseness to his 
insight and the Charybdis of defiance toward others, 
fraught with affliction to those whom he would only 
love and bless. Many a firm spirit, with wing 
eager to flutter out of the open cage-door, is asking 
at this moment, S( Must I sacrifice everything to 
this new abstract belief of mine? Shall I forget 
business relations, bruise friendships, grieve those 
nearest and dearest, overshadow the social prospects 
of my children, by openly identifying myself with 
the despised and rejected truth? or may I not 
silently cherish my higher faith under apparent 
conformity ?" 

These are not easy questions to answer. Few 
things are so sacred as our personal relations. It 
seems hard that any duty should require us to 



CROSS ROADS. 



shatter the unity of our homes. And, as a matter 
of fact, it cannot be doubted that vast numbers are 
worshipping at altars inwardly abjured, because the 
sword of their spirit, though strong enough to carve 
through iron, is not fine enough to divide the 
yielding veil of personal affection ; and this all 
the more because the Church, more anxious for 
outward than for inward allegiance, hastens to 
mitigate its creed privately for every clever youth, 
and speaks with double tongue. 

The Pilgrim hastened to listen to what the two 
eminent and liberated thinkers would say to the 
young men of St. Andrew's on this great issue ; but, 
alas, instead of being furthered on his journey, he 
found himself left without any clear sign-post at 
cross roads. What a symptom it is of the chaotic 
condition of thought in this transitional era, that 
two mature and accomplished scholars should, on 
such an occasion, solemnly call young men to con- 
trary paths ! Regarding the same shore, one cries, 
Sail North ! the other, Sail South ! In the presence 
of these youths — of orthodox training, many of them 
looking to the ministry — both of the University 
Rectors referred to assumed that it is impossible 
for an educated mind to believe the doctrines of 
the reigning Churches. The question was there 
before them, What were those youths to do ? Were 
they to remain in the Church and sliiy undermine 
its doctrine ? Were they to disappoint parent and 



2oo AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Church, and openly war upon the dogmas counting 
on their support ? 

For once it seemed to be the voice of Erasmus, 
rather than that of John Knox, speaking through 
those honoured lips — ever strong upon the weaker 
side — which said, (< Let all who conscientiously can 
remain in the Church, whether their interpretations 
of its doctrines be the usual ones or not. Be 
careful not to leave the national provisions for reli- 
gious teaching and worship in the hands of bigots. 
A Church is far more easily improved from within 
than from without." 

Hardly half-battles, either, were the words of 
the historian, though their thrust was deeper. 
" Those who are in possession of the field are 
bidding high for the intellect which is becoming 
alienated. Radicalism must be reverent, but it 
must be self-truthful. Be honest with yourselves, 
whatever the temptation; tamper not with your own 
minds ; the Evil Spirit Humbug is abroad. But 
remember that all long-established formulas once 
held living truths, which must be respected; that, 
after all, you of the advanced views may be wrong; 
that others have the same right as you to their 
opinions; that truth's destiny does not depend upon 
you ; and that the social courtesy which forbids us 
to say in private what would give pain to others, 
forbids us equally in public to obtrude opinions 
which offend those who do not share them." 



CROSS ROADS. 



20I 



Listening to both of these voices the Pilgrim 
thanks Heaven that heroes sometimes live lives 
that can outweigh their occasional nods ! 

It may be, indeed, that if every young listener at 
St. Andrew's were in the habit of weighing words, 
he might detect in the language of the Rector for 
1867, not advice for free men, but advice to pri- 
soners, how they may make the best of their hard 
lot. It is the tendency of the advice, as given to 
youths who need not be prisoners, which seems to 
look downward. Stay inside if you possibly can, 
it says : if by unusual interpretations, by hook or 
by crook, you can hold on to the Establishment 
without being actually expelled by force, do so, for 
the advantages of being there are very great. Is 
this an encouragement to frankness, simplicity, 
straightforwardness, or to the casuistic habit of 
mind ? Is it trusting in truth, or in truth's oppo- 
site, prestige ? Advantages in this world continue 
to demand their price, and whether it be better 
that our young men should turn themselves into 
intellectual prestidigitateurs to secure power in the 
Establishment, or whether they should pay every 
opportunity it offers to be men 

"Whose armour is their honest thought, 
And simple truth their only skill, 

is a question on which the Pilgrim appeals from the 
Rector of St. Andrew's to the man who paid 



202 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



a seat in Parliament to defend the political equality 
of an Atheist. 

If thinkers abandon the Church, the national 
provision for religious instruction will indeed be 
monopolised by the stupid ; but if, as the theory in 
question assumes, the Church represent falsities to 
the masses, does not he who remains in it sanction 
those falsities? Three-fourths of his weight must 
inevitably go in favour of the interpretation it bears 
to the a2*aTeo;ate mind, whatever reservations be in 
his own mind, or even in his speech. We do, 
indeed, all sustain institutions mingled with error, 
but, if faithful, only those wherein truth and utility 
are preponderant, and the error plainly and pro- 
fessedly unconstitutional ; but where a thing is 
preponderantly hurtful, and its organic law false, — 
where for every true utterance it proclaims a thousand 
superstitions, — shall we not say that the one way for 
that institution is that it shall be utterly relegated 
to meanness and stupidity ? When the brains are 
out, it will die. It is the deep game of injustice and 
error to bribe with promises of opportunity for good 
the piety and wit which alone can renew their lease 
of life. What will not the usurper in France 
give for the adhesion of the literary men in his 
projects of oppression ? 

Unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou 
united ! Let the true life of the age ebb away from 
every strand of wrong, leaving there the hulks to 



CROSS ROADS. 



203 



rot ; let it beat with full tide to the shores where 
wait the ships for whose voyage hearts are pining, 
to float which is to bear the freight of truth to 
spirits that hunger, straining their eyes to the 
horizon throughout the earth! He is happy who has 
attained a society of kindred minds, and every such 
environment is to the individual mind as a fortress 
beneath his tower of vision. But let him have 
other aims than that for which his stronghold was 
raised, and it becomes his prison. When faces cease 
to become physiognomical, they become masks. 
Every teacher who stands before the community 
with an expression of forms and articles which are 
not the real features into which his spirit would 
freely organise itself, wears a mask through which 
every tone from behind will be changed, every look 
perverted, and the people will hear what they came 
to hear, whatever be said. What power is wasted 
thus from age to age ! One of Plato's disciples, 
anticipating Munchausen, compared his master's 
thoughts to words frozen in the air as soon as 
uttered, to be heard long after when thawed out 
by a warmer season, as voices falling out of the 
air upon astonished travellers. The conceit may 
well suggest the great truths which, amid the mass 
of ritual and error, must have been uttered in the 
temples of many lands, by advanced souls trying to 
express themselves through the old forms and 
phrases. Every such thought is frozen in the icy 



204 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



death around it, there to remain till some reformer 
brings a spring-tide, expressing itself in its own leaf 
and flower, when the age that least needs them 
hears on the summer air the plaintive prophecies 
and far-reaching sentences which were withheld from 
those who first heard or read them because not 
bravely separated from contemporary superstitions. 
Undoubtedly there are some vigorous voices heard 
beyond their cloisters; but they only remind us what 
we are losing, for their strength is divided, their 
sense confused. If this age realised the need of a 
purer mental morality, it would be startled at find- 
ing it possible, when a venerable and scholarly 
clergyman closes a long ministry, for a friendly and 
faithful listener to represent that in that time the 
great themes of his ministry have been the " divine 
character of man as man," and the " belief in a 
universe of law, and in the progress and develop- 
ment of man as a part of that system of law;" and 
for another listener, equally friendly and faithful, to 
represent the same long ministry as devoted to 
showing that man " has fallen away from God," and 
" that law and progress without God and Christ 
are as the godless world of Richter's vision."* So 
much for the help of those who become part of the 
Church in order to reform it. 

Across this road the historian clears another : 

* See the criticisms in the Pall Mall Gazette (November, 1869) on 
the Rev. F. D. Maurice and his ministry in Yere Street. 



CROSS ROADS. 



205 



whither tends that ? By his rule, the young man 
whose mind has abandoned the old moorings of 
belief would strictly conform his personal relations 
with his changed views. He would adhere to no 
Church or Party which did not represent his private 
opinions ; but he would be reticent in stating those 
opinions except where they are welcome, — that is, 
he would advocate them where they required no 
advocacy; he would not publicly assail the aban- 
doned principles, nor seek to enthrone those he has 
attained. And the first reason for this course is 
that it is a primary duty not to offend others, who 
have as good a right to their opinions as he has to his. 
So far as this advice would characterise the spirit 
and style of our advocacy of unpopular convictions, 
nothing could be wiser. Nearly every opinion may 
be stated in a gentle or in an offensive way. An 
Oriental prince asked two interpreters to explain his 
dream. One said, " You will lose all your 
relatives, then die yourself." The monarch ordered 
this prophet of evil to be beheaded. The other 
said, " Your majesty will survive all your rela- 
tions." The prince loaded this one with favours, 
though his interpretation was really the same 
as that of the other. Thus there are two ways 
of doing things. The adherent of Truth should 
not hold her up in a form that shall repel, but 
in that which shall attract. But to bid him hold 
his peace about his convictions in deference to 



2o6 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



those opposed to them would have silenced Jesus 
before the Pharisees, Paul before the image-makers 
of Ephesus, and Luther at the Diet of Worms. 
The young man turns to a pillar of savourless salt 
on the day he shall follow that strange admoni- 
tion. Nor does the fact that each dead formula 
once contained a living spirit warrant its claim 
to remain as an obstacle in the path of that 
now required by the living spirit. But, after all, 
it is said, he of the advanced views may be wrong. 
Certainly he may be; and until he has pondered that 
fully, the more silent the better. There is good 
need that the young lads of St. Andrew's should be 
reminded of the danger of committing them- 
selves hastily to immature speculations, and also 
that it is a frivolous mind which thinks it neces- 
sary to cover everybody with ill-considered doubts. 
So long as one has only half-thoughts and unfledged 
speculations, it were miserable self-conceit to call the 
attention of the Universe to them. But convictions 
— the word is from con and vincere, and refers to 
things which have finally conquered heart and 
mind— are more serious ; and every noble mind will 
not merely Orpah-like kiss his mother of conscious 
Truth, but cleave unto her — following that whither- 
soever it may lead, sharing its fate, willing to be 
buried with it. 



XVII. 

A FETE-DIEU AT TROUVILLE. 



The roads tending to God are more in number than the breathings 
of created beings. 

Sasax. 



Be to the best thou knowest ever true 

Is all the creed. 
Then, be thy talisman of rosy hue, 

Or fenced with thorns that, wearing, thou must bleed, 
Or gentle pledge of love's prophetic view, 

Thy faithful steps it will securely lead. 

aTargaret Fuller. 



A FETE-D1EU AT TROUVILLE. 




HAT Wordsworth desired — that his days 
should be linked each to each by natural 
piety — is fulfilled in the religious life of 
these simple peasants around the watering-place 
of Trouville-sur-Mer. A walk along embowered 
paths brings one to the ancient statue revered by 
the people as the Virgin of the Forest. Was it 
originally meant for the Madonna, or for a priestess 
of the Druids ? Was it Mary ? was it Yelleda ? 
There is no cross nor inscription. It may be 
that as Ma, Maia, Mary, she has received the 
veneration of successive generations. Among all 
the mottoes which surround her now, the majority 
signify that she is regarded as the tutelary di- 
vinity of fishermen and sailors. " To her who 
saved me from the wreck ;" il To her who rescued 
me in a storm;" "The Star of the Sea," — such 
are the tributes to her; the last being fre- 
quently repeated. It may have been the Goddess 
of Beauty, who rose out of the sea-foam, that 
became thus, through the dangers and storms en- 

O 



2IO 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



countered by her worshippers, consecrated to a 
deeper meaning than she had for the Romans who 
brought her hither, and, blended with the loving 
Madonna, stood forth now as the providential star 
shining for those who go down to the sea in ships. 
Ere she became invested with this tenderer light, 
she may have served to gather about her all the 
gentler elements of beliefs yet earlier, and softened 
the wild reign of Odin ere she mitigated the severe 
sway of J ahve. 

Whoever the saint may be whose day returns 
for celebration among these people, it is always the 
Virgin who receives their homage. All other forms 
have waned into dimness beside the light of the 
Mother whom they ever behold throned in the 
heavens. Two of the Sundays which I passed at 
Trouville were devoted to the Fete-Dieu — the 
ancient festival of the sacrament, instituted by 
Urban IV. just six hundred years ago, neglected 
now in the chief Grallican cities. Early in the 
morning the young men and maidens and the 
children of the neighbourhood gathered together 
and formed a procession. The girls were all arrayed 
in white, and the young men decorated with gar- 
lands. The youths bore in their hands leaves of 
corn and green flags and clover ; the children had 
little baskets filled with rose-leaves. With these 
all the streets through which the priests bore the 
sacrament were strewn, and the town soon became 



A FETE-DIEU AT TROUVILLE. 



21 I 



carpeted with flowers. Altars were raised at 
various points in the streets, and the chanting pro- 
cession went all day from altar to altar, at each of 
which a Mass was said. There was now and then a 
reminiscence of the old miracle -plays. A child 
dressed with a strip of wool about the loins, and 
bearing a long wooden cross, represented John the 
Baptist ; and, led by the hand of this one, another, 
dressed in a blue robe and bearing a silver cross, 
impersonated the infant Jesus. There might be 
something a trifle grotesque to sophisticated eyes in 
seeing these sacred infants refreshed now T and then, 
as they were, with gingerbread ; but to these 
simple people the impression was not marred by 
any such sense of incongruity, and no doubt the 
children truly represented the facts of the case. A 
lovely young girl of about eighteen years, who, in 
addition to her pure white dress, wore a long veil 
reaching to her feet, represented the Virgin Mary : 
and as the procession turned from the Mass she bent 
low, and each child threw a handful of rose-leaves 
upon her as she passed. Everywhere along the 
street, and in the church, which all at length entered, 
there were banners festooned with flowers and 
inscribed with endearing names to the Virgin — the 
favourite being, ' : The Star of the Sea." The 
Virgin was no dogma to these fishermen, but an 
ever-watching eye of love above that element upon 
which and by which they lived. 



2X2 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Not to be disconnected from the cheerful words 
of the priest, the glad notes of the choir, and the 
radiance of serene faith and happiness upon all, was 
this idea of a tender Mother above them all. They 
were not haunted by any devil, nor overshadowed 
by the fear of hell. They were undoubting believers 
in a faith which made them happy, as a faith well 
might which had replaced the jealous Jahve with 
a supreme maternal love. 

The day after I had witnessed this I saw near 
a House built in the park of the Great Exposition 
a set of rigid long-faced men from London dis- 
tributing tracts to those who passed by. Some of 
these tracts I accepted and glanced through before 
tearing them to pieces. They were redolent of 
brimstone ; warned people that they were going to 
hell ; exhorted Catholics to abjure their idolatries, 
particularly the worship of Mary; and described 
God as in high wrath, and Christ as one about to 
descend as minister of divine vengeance. Most of 
those who passed looked on the colporteurs with 
the merest curiosity as a part of the show. 

Why should people dethrone out of their hearts 
a supreme loving mother, and raise in her place an 
angry jealous autocrat? Let any man compare 
that happy religious festivity at Trouville with the 
gloomy services of a London Chapel, and say which 
is preferable. The religion of the Catholic peasant 
is indeed unenlightened, but is it more so than the 



A FETE-DIEU AT TROUVILLE. 



213 



incredible creed of " Evangelicals," who bring no 
evangel, no glad tidings, but only tidings of woe? 
Who could associate rose-leaves with hell-fires, or 
wreathe the Torturer of Souls with evergreen? 
It is inconceivable that any faith can be perma- 
nently vanquished by one less attractive than 
itself. 

It may be said that in Germany and England 
the present hard deity of Protestantism did replace 
the tenderer being adored by Catholic populations. 
It is true that, along with the sunshine and flowers 
of the old faith, there came miasmas in the summer 
air, and reptiles creeping among the flowers, and 
that in the vigorous wrath which would ex- 
terminate these, and flash purifying lightnings 
through the atmosphere, many beautiful growths 
were destroyed. The human heart in its indigna- 
tion was not discriminating; they who bore the 
cross in their lives would not look upon the shape 
of it which had become the symbol of corruption, 
and they would not tolerate the Mother who seemed 
to have become allied with the Mother of Harlots. 
So the winter of Puritanism came on. Yet beneath 
its snow every seed of Faith's old summer was safely 
kept for the fairer spring-tide. If one would find the 
reappearance of the floral festivals of Trouville, he 
must look to New England when Puritanism has 
had its full outcome. There, in the merry summer 
festivals of the most liberal or " radical " churches, 



2I 4 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



he will find the same joy blooming beneath the sunny 
faith which, under Channing, Parker, Emerson, and 
many another, has flowered out of the storm- 
nurst stem of Puritanism. " Gotama made a new 
song for the old god." The whole task of the 
religion which is there the direct heir of Calvinism 
has been for nearly two generations the breathing 
of a new life on the fields which its frosts have 
so long and so necessarily bound, to lead out the 
blossoms again • and although the Madonna re- 
appears no more on the altars from which she was 
withdrawn, the love she signified is preserved in the 
ever- watchful God whom Theodore Parker addressed 
in his prayers as " our Father and our Mother." 

It is an indication of the depth of the imperish- 
able sentiment which gladdens the creed of the 
Catholic peasant, that from the time when the wor- 
ship of the Virgin was overthrown by Protestantism 
her heavenly office was transferred to her holy 
child, so that the pictures of Jesus came to repre- 
sent no longer a man, but a man with the long 
locks and tender aspect of a woman. 

The sage and the seer conversed, and the 
dervise listened. Afterward the sage said, " All 
that the seer sees, I know." The seer said, " All 
that the sage knows, I see." But the dervise said, 
" All that the sage knows, and the seer sees, I 
feel." The heart has a logic of its own. These 
peasants are reaching by blind ways, unknown to 



A FETE-DIEU AT TROU VILLE. 



215 



our colder Anglo-Saxon brains, the happier faith 
toward which our thinkers are struggling. 

'Tis an old theme, my brothers, this Divine 
Love, and it cannot be exhausted. Men have not 
outlived it, angels cannot outlearn it. It swayed 
the ancient world by many a fair god and goddess ; 
its light has been cast over ages of Christian con- 
troversy and warfare ; it is still the guiding Star of 
the Sea to each voyager after the nobler faith. The 
youth leaves the old shore of belief only because 
love has left it. His starved affections will no 
longer accept stone, though pulverised flour-like 
and artfully kneaded, for bread. Their white sails 
fill the purple and the sombre seas, and they hail 
each the other to ask for the summer land where 
faith climbs to beauty, and the lost bowers of child- 
hood's trust may be found again. A prosperous 
voyage to you, brave brothers ! 



XVIII. 

A VIGIL. 



Let the simple soul extend unimpeded its fiery energy. The 
immortal heart should be the leader; but let all your eyes look 
upward ! 

Zoroaster. 



"What hath not man sought out and found, 
But his dear God ? who yet his glorious love 
Embosoms in us, mellowing the ground 

With showers, with frosts, with love and awe. 

George Herbert. 



A VIGIL. 



N" the Vigil of the Immaculate Conception 
of the Virgin Mary I went to listen to 
the discourse of a good-hearted priest. 
His argument was, that since, as Protestantism 
admitted, Jesus could only be free from the taint 
of our common humanity by a miraculous concep- 
tion, so was it necessary also that his mother should, 
in the same manner, have been secured from 
hereditary sin. It was but a step in consistency, 
yet it was that. The neighbouring clergyman, who 
holds this theory in horror, nevertheless preaches 
it, and helps to build every convent where women 
are taught that motherhood is impure, every time 
he declares that human nature is depraved, and that 
Jesus was born without a human father. 

Then I went to a gathering of Men of Science 
to hear a paper read on the relative nature of the 
sexes in all parts of the world. Having proved to 
his own satisfaction that the female sex was every- 
where inferior to the male, the author of the paper 




220 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



denounced the efforts now being made for the 
elevation of women, and asked, (S For what end is 
woman created?" His answer was — "Maternity." 
Then straightway he proceeded to show that by 
that word he meant simply the bringing of children 
into the world. Even if this were all that is implied 
in the word Mother, one might say that no kind 
or amount of human knowledge were too much for 
woman, and that every college should throw open 
its doors for her. But is that all ? That woman 
with the babe in her arms is to bear it again, a man; 
from her pains and labours a character is to be 
added to society. Shut out from colleges, she is to 
educate a soul ; excluded from politics, she is to 
train voters and legislators. Her mother's work 
shall be felt for good or ill in every nerve of the 
world, which holds — somewhat uneasily, one is glad 
to see, in these last days — the end of her existence 
to be that of a prolific animal. 

Against the theories of the priest and the savant 
I weighed the wisdom of a child I knew who could 
not be induced to say the Lord's Prayer unless she 
were permitted to insert " Mother" in its first 
clause. The testimonies of as;es were summed in 
the protest of her spirit : the goddesses beside their 
gods ; the Madonnas of Mexican, Buddhist, Egyp- 
tian, and Chinese temples; Aditi, Isis, Ceres, Freyja, 
Mary, — they all came as Morning Stars to sing their 
chorus around this child, over whose cradle the kind 



A VIGIL, 



221 



mother who meant them all had watched till God's 
eye shone through hers. 

An old legend relates that, when Mary fled with 
the infant Jesus into Egypt, she once entered a 
temple of Serapis, where all the images of the 
country's deities were collected. At the moment 
when she entered, all the statues fell from their 
niches, and lay shattered on the floor. The wor- 
shippers prostrated themselves, and bewailed their 
ruined idols; but when they presently looked up, 
they saw in the place of each fallen statue a radiant 
white-winged angel, and, crowned above them all, 
Mary with the holy babe in her arms. 

Well, the ages passed, and Mary, with her child, 
hardened into stone. Three hundred years ago, 
when Tetzel stood at her altar selling every vice, 
and she, with the saints around her, stood cold and 
still with no word to utter, a holier mother entered, 
and the floor was heaped with the fragments of the 
idols of the Church. It has taken their worshippers 
long to perceive that in their places arose that day 
the shining forms of living virtues. 

There came a day when, as the boy Martin 
Luther sang his songs in the street, a true Madonna 
took him into her home, loved him, taught him. 
He who had seen the beauty of Ursula's life was 
not to be deceived by a painted doll superintending 
the sale of adultery for ducats. That gilded puppet 
he struck down, and thenceforth the long-imprisoned 



222 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



ideal of a holy womanhood ascended to the heart of 
Grod, descended to the life of man, and passed on to 
lead man to his nobler society. Calvinism was but 
the chaos of the shattered idols which fell when 
Virtue entered the Church ; but when above that 
ruin the human heart looked up without fear, and 
caught the smile of a Father's face in the Heavens, 
it really worshipped the Madonna. For it is 
woman who represents the principle of Love in 
this Universe. To her the great offices of affec- 
tion are confided, and to her sufferings and tasks 
its profounder laws and secrets are disclosed. 

The father loves also, but because he has been 
taught by her. Where woman is a slave, the father 
is a stern patriarch; only as she has gradually gained 
equality, influence, reverence, has he been able to 
make his name one of tender association. And as 
this perpetual Madonna has made the civilised 
home, she must proceed to civilise the school and 
the state, and to ennoble human character. We 
need only contrast the cultured home with our 
corrupt politics, we need only look from our social 
intercourse to the snarling of nation with nation, to 
see where the influence of woman remains to be felt. 
Where man reverses the fiat of his ancient instinct, 
and claims that ff it is good for man to be alone," 
there is he barbarous still. But woman " is not fit 
to be a soldier." That is her credential to lead to 
the ages of peace. She is inharmonious with every 



A VIGIL. 



223 



remnant of barbarism, with all that is passing away 
— with war, with hustings mobs; but how stands 
she related with the society for which good men 
are striving? 

All suns mean the light by which I walk. The 
new heaven of ideas opened for this age signifies a 
new earth also. The Madonna disappearing from 
her constellation reappears in many warm human 
forms : first of all, in the ideal of manly character. 
Every man worthy to be out of prison must 
now be in good part a woman; and just in the 
proportion that the masculine nature ascends to 
the strength which comes of a receptive spirit, — so 
far, that is, as it is mystically married to the femi- 
nine nature, — it is touched to the finer issues of 
existence. No one can be noble but by noble 
passions. The manly heart shall be the most vir- 
ginal. (For the satire which has confined the 
word virgin to one sex shall be perceived when 
men have learned to exact of their own souls that 
which they exact of woman !) We know a good 
woman when we see her : which of her qualities is 
it would disgrace a man ? 
Effeminacy ! 

Behold the great Sisterhood of Saviours : what 
foreheads shine more fair in the history of those 
who have raised the earth by noble passions than 
theirs? The stately Iphigenia finds her nuptial 
and her glory in dying for her country ; Antigone 



224 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



cannot be parted by any power or terror from her 
brother's corpse ; Hypatia will perish with her gods ; 
the Countess Emily Plater, the Maid of Orleans, 
leap forth as divine lightnings, scorning danger and 
death. Above all, behold that unmoved figure 
amid the wild storms on the summit of Calvary ! 
With cruel mockeries the martyr on his cross is 
buffeted. Where are his disciples ? " They all 
forsook him and fled." He looks around on the 
glaring eyes, hears the scoffing words, and cries, 
"My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Had 
he looked downward, he would have seen a figure 
clasping his cross, a face turned with agony to meet 
his last look, which would have mutely said, 
" Poor sufferer, thou art not forsaken. A love like 
thine own hovers near thee." There stood by the 
cross of Jesus his mother ; and as she stands there 
she is the prophecy of the Madonnas of all noble 
causes. She forecasts the far-shining year when 
there shall be manly women and womanly men. 
Happy they who, by sharing her fortitude and 
devotion, have realised in their own breasts a 
picture of her more saintly than artist ever drew or 
priest adored. 

It was for a far-and-wide pilgrimage through the 
earth that the Madonna abandoned the altars of the 
Church. She ascended to blend with and soften 
the wrathful Jehovah into a loving Father; she 
gave a second birth to Jesus, and from being a 



A VIGIL. 



225 



severe judge he became the gentle pleader for man; 
she entered the breast of man, and his strength was 
mystically married to her finer power, to make 
ideal character. But not yet were her ministrations 
ended. With his deeper eye man could now recog- 
nise her sacred form moving along the pathways of 
the earth, could trace her in the soothed brow of 
sickness, in the ray that lighted the home of toil, in 
a warmth that lingered about fireless hearth-stones, 
in steps of light and love radiant amid the selfish- 
ness of commerce. He could see the reappearance 
of good mothers in good men. (Of Auguste Comte 
many things may be forgotten, but not that he 
placed his wife and servant-girl in his Calendar of 
Saints.) 

A Roman Catholic priest said, " It was a fear- 
ful loss to you Protestants when you gave up our 
Blessed Mother." To him the Pilgrim replied with 
this fable. A child found, then lost, a beautiful 
butterfly. She sought it again with tears. Mean- 
while, the butterfly had alighted softly on the child's 
head, and remained there during the search. Have 
we, then, lost the Blessed Mother? Some of us 
have found her at our sides, the Madonna of every- 
day life, bringing intimations of the Eternal Heart 
to our firesides, whispering all unconsciously by her 
fidelity and tenderness, " O human heart, surely 
thou canst trust the Source of the hearts of good 
women." One day, as I shall hope, even you, 

p 



226 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



priestly brother, will awake to the perception that, 
while you have been glorifying the dead Mary with 
new dogmas, and hurling anathemas on the educa- 
tion and elevation of the living Mary, they who 
have most of all, as you say, lost the Madonna, are 
really embodying her soul in a new era of civilisa- 
tion. Behold, it is the Vigil of the Bridal Day 
of Man and Woman in the State, and the stars 
prophesy of the offspring of that great marriage 
— the reign of Love, and ages of Peace. 



XIX. 



OLD TEMPLES. 



Each age has its own follies, as its majority is made up of 
foolish young people ; its superstitions appear no superstitions to 
itself. But after a short time down go its folly and weakness, and 
the memory of them ; its virtues alone remain, and its limitation 
assumes the form of a heautiful superstition, as the dimness of our 
sight clothes the objects in the horizon with mist and colour. The 
revelation of reason is this of the unchangeableness of the fact of 
humanity under all its subjective aspects, that to the cowering it 
always cowers, to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients 
are only venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was 
trivial ; as the sun and stars affect us grandly only because we can- 
not reach to their smoke and surfaces, and say, Is this all ? 

Emerson. 

The empty ruins, lapsed again 
Into Nature's wide domain, 
Sow themselves with seed and grain, 
As Day and Xight and Day go by, 
And hoard June's sun and April's rain. 

Allixgham. 



OLD TEMPLES. 



UEINGr the last Exposition at Paris I 
visited the International Chess Tourna- 
ment. It was a somewhat strange ex- 
perience to sit in that silent room and witness the 
solemnity of these champions from various parts of 
Europe and America grappling with each other 
in mimic strife, while nations with their great 
competitions roared around them. They were 
fine-browed men, too, scholarly in their casual 
talk, and it was almost grotesque with what in- 
tensity of feeling or flushes of despair they hurled 
pawn against pawn, and knight against knight. 
Alexander the Great confessed with shame, it is 
said, his interest in this game ; and yet it has 
survived the interest in his wars. 

There is a legend of the origin of Chess, which 
I have heard, that the warriors in some old evenly- 
fought never-decided battle were finally trans- 
formed into these little figures, that they might 
continue their struggle to the end of time without 




230 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



disturbing the rest of the world. The fable is not 
a bad one as concerns other matters. Men have 
always been pursuing apparently vast things, which 
seemed to them to have no end of importance, but 
which Time reduces, until for later generations they 
become as chess kings and chess bishops. There are 
men who, indeed, still carry on the game amid the 
world of real interests, but the masses look on with 
wonder. Here, for example, at the door of the 
building where the players sit a' their tourney, is a 
small Hebrew temple, erected by some silly London 
Society for the Conversion of the Jews, which 
contains a model of the Holy Sepulchre at Jeru- 
salem and of all the churches that cluster around it. 
There are temples, convents, shrines, chapels, 
altars, mosques, representing about fifteen peoples 
of the earth. The part owned by each is defined 
by a special colour, and the model — it was made by 
command of the Viceroy of Egypt — may be taken to 
pieces, showing you all that is inside and beneath the 
sacred spot. Here is stratum on stratum, — Coptic, 
Syrian, Greek, Armenian, Russian, Roman, English, 
even American. Remove a Greek temple, and 
under it is a Roman Catholic " Chapel of the Three 
Crosses;" beneath that, again, some temple burrows 
to a rock said to have been rent at the crucifixion. 
While one race claims that it holds the spot where 
Jesus was buried, another boasts its possession of 
that where the manger lay ; for rivalry has worked 



OLD TEMPLES. 



the miracle that Jesus should have been born and 
reared, been tried, scourged, crucified, and buried, 
all within this little circle of space ! As the ex- 
hibitor went on with his explanations the smile 
went round at the little religious chess-board, 
and his story of the jealousies and antagonisms 
surrounding it ; and yet the model represented the 
bitter and bloody wars of over a thousand years. 
Not the smallest shrine but cost the best blood of 
the generation which fixed it there. The march of 
the Crusaders shaking the world has ended with 
Lord Shaftesbury and his journeymen soul-savers, 
and a generation of which few would give a drop of 
blood out of their finger to decide whether Pope 
or Sultan should own the spot where Jesus was 
buried. 

It is sometimes said that culture chills en- 
thusiasm. It may be true: they who have pon- 
dered the course of the world have detected the 
shadows that seem so solid to the ignorant. They 
see the great aims of one age dissolving into the 
fanaticism or sport of the next. They see the cards 
and dice that once divined destinies reduced to be 
the amusements of idle hours, and anticipate 
the day when the insignia of the Churches, which are 
already of more importance as pieces of a political 
game than as related to the religious interests of 
mankind, shall become the prey of the antiquary. 
With what mere curiosity does this crowd visit the 



232 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



models of Mexican, Egyptian, and other ancient 
temples in the Park of the Exposition ! How 
little did the victims who counted themselves happy 
that their blood might redden these old altars, or 
the priests who slew them, dream that they were 
merely furnishing a few hieroglyphs for the future 
archaeologist ! This Siamese praying - machine, 
which twirls out its hundred, and twenty prayers 
per minute, these Hindoo idols, do they excite 
more laughter or wonder than our European hells 
and devils will excite a hundred years from now ? 
They will be quoted to prove the barbarism of the 
society in which they found believers. 

Wherefore did the old temples exist, and what 
end do the monsters still worshipped by men 
answer? What purpose has this universe in lead- 
ing- Mexicans to slaughter their children before 
idols, or Japanese to believe in the existence of 
green devils with asses' ears? A question suffi- 
ciently answerable if we look at the fossil monsters 
which pioneered man in his advent to this planet. 
Not beautiful by any means was Ichthyosaurus, 
yet through him and his ugly comrades came the 
temper and force of man, even as the fashioned iron 
passed from ore to furnace, and from anvil to anvil. 
The artist does well who rests the pedestal of his 
fair statue on griffins ; his hero is the transfigura- 
tion of their vitality. If the old temples and the 
battles about absurd dogmas have passed into 



OLD TEMPLES. 



233 



chessmen, not so the strength they added to our 
sinews. Maximilian found lately 15,000 Mexi- 
cans as ready to be shot for the cause of their 
country as their ancestors had been ready to bleed 
on altars for a fictitious deity. The shrines of the 
Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem did not sink into insig- 
nificance before they had weighed the forces of 
every race, and apportioned to each its right position 
and territory. These were the touches that crystal- 
lised the new society of Europe. The boy with his 
whistle explores the laws of sound ; in his play, he 
trains himself to harmony with the earth's centre of 
gravitation ; the wing of the butterfly he chases will 
blend at last with great ideals, will shine in galaxies. 

The world is a larger man, the man is a smaller 
world, and our lives repeat in embryonic changes 
the history of our race. Nay, we are individually 
liable to arrests of development such as are now 
found binding whole races of men to the world's 
childhood. There are Asias of thought as well as 
Americas of thought. Many a man who lives for 
six days of each week in civilised society worships 
on the seventh in ancient Mexico. 

How many of us would proceed another step if 
we saw the farther end of our path, and the final 
outcome of the thing we are pursuing ? Will this 
grand avenue change at length to a squirrel-track, 
and run up a tree? I heard a philosopher commend 
his friend, a chemist, whom he found converting his 



234 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 

old shirts into loaf-sugar. Is there not a chemistry 
by which the human spirit also may convert its 
cast-off raiment into sweetness ? There is nothing 
which the worship of Thought cannot transmute. 
He who humbly adores the supreme Reason will 
derive from each old creed or temple its contri- 
bution. The poet looked on the chambered nau- 
tilus sailing on with its old sealed-up chambers for 
hull and ballast, and sang — 

Build thee more stately mansions, 0 my soul, 
As the swift seasons roll ; 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 
Till thou at length art free, 

Leaving thine outworn shell on life's unsounded sea. 




XX. 



CHRIST ON THE ASS. 



There are two things which I ahhor — the learned in his infi- 
delities, and the fool in his devotions. 

Mahomet. 



Be of good cheer ; the sullen Month will die, 
And a young Moon requite us hy and hy : 

Look how the old one, meagre, bent, and wan 
"With age and fast, is fainting from the sky! 

Omar Khayyam. 



CHRIST ON THE ASS. 



N the Roman Catholic cathedral of Cincin- 
nati, Ohio, I found a painting by poor 
Haydon, which through many fortuities 
had found its way thither. It represented the 
entrance of Jesus into J erusalem seated on an ass. 
With all the intensity of personal feeling pervading 
the works of that artist, — who, with his high ideal, 
had an unequal execution, — he had placed in this 
picture his divinity and his devil. Wordsworth and 
Voltaire stand among those looking on — the former 
as a devout disciple, the latter as a scoffing Sadducee. 
Voltaire has his chin in the air, and has nothing 
but contempt for the whole affair; Wordsworth 
bends so low that his obeisance seems rather to the 
ass than to the man seated on it. The work is 
probably more suggestive than the artist intended. 
One cannot help being reminded of the great modern 
poet's abasement of his genius before the gallows 
and under the dogmas of the Church, and of how 
the great French iconoclast too often contented 



238 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



himself with mere denial, and, as the Germans say, 
threw out the baby with the bath. 

The legend represented in the picture itself 
shows us how long the kind of reverence illustrated 
by Wordsworth has degraded the symbols of reli- 
gion. Zechariah wrote, " Behold, thy King cometh 
unto thee : he is just, and having salvation ; lowly, 
and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of 
an ass." The earliest Society for the Conversion 
of the Jews was very much of the same kind with 
the latest, and, in its eagerness to prove that all the 
prophecies were literally fulfilled by Jesus, mistook 
the Hebrew idiom of Zechariah, who meant by the 
ass and the colt one animal only ; and it is recorded 
that Christ's disciples " brought the ass, and the 
colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him 
thereon" — thus making Jesus ride into Jerusalem 
on two animals ! We may not therefore be sure that 
Jesus really rode into Jerusalem on an ass at all ; 
but the story is an abundant witness of the fact that 
a blind worship of the letter forces the highest truth 
of every age to ride upon superstition and stupidity. 
Whether it be the Old Jerusalem or the New 
Jerusalem, the reforming spirit must deal with the 
donkey element in human nature, and conciliate its 
stubborn bigotry. The geologist may discover 
what he pleases, but Society can receive his dis- 
covery only if it be seated on the cosmogony of 
Moses. Freedom may be good, but you must make 



CHRIST ON THE ^SS. 



239 



it out somehow that the patriarchs held no slaves, 
and Paul returned no fugitive. Whatever reform 
you will have you can get, provided you can show 
that it is a c< return to the old principles of the con- 
stitution;" to prove it simply an improvement on 
the same were fatal. Baptise your atheism, or 
Comtism, or anti-marriage doctrine, or other 
radicalism, as Primitive Christianity, seat it on a 
text, and you will have a fair chance for your 
New Jerusalem. 

I would not underrate the ass ; he is a patient 
and strong beast, with all his stubbornness and other 
drawbacks. I can tolerate him even when he comes 
on two feet, and lifts up his unmistakable voice in 
Parliament against Reform, or in Convocation against 
Church Disestablishment. But I cannot join in 
the chant and homage of Holy Ass Day. It is by 
the side of the apotheosis of the conservative quad- 
ruped that the scoff of Voltaire must be judged. 
The claim he made on St. Louis, " He should have 
been above his age," has been applied to Voltaire 
in censure ; but as he recedes from us we perceive 
that his satire and laughter were the other side of a 
reverence for ideals, the ragged threads of one side 
of a tapestry whose cartoon on the other is not with- 
out majesty. There is a background to that scoffer 
not to be seen by the age that includes the ass along 
with the Christ in its homage. The fire in the smithy 
may be traced to the sun, the blacksmith's blow on the 



240 



AN EARTH WARD PILGRIMAGE. 



anvil employs the energy of every planet; and the 
great Denier, kindling revolutionary fires in which 
things held sacred shall be consumed, is not to be 
estimated as a mere hand and rapier without alliance 
with the hot pulses of the outraged heart of Man. 
The only pure Theism of this age is that which the 
remorseless assaults of Voltaire on Christian My- 
thology has rendered possible. Nevertheless, it is 
just because he did his work so well that we need 
not do it over again. We can lay our palm before 
the heroic prophet of Jerusalem without prostrating 
ourselves for the honour of having his ass ride over 
us, or even mingling with our homage a respect for 
the current superstitions above which he could not 
always rise. 

But what shall we say of the cultivated Euro- 
peans whose god is a dead Jew? Wordsw T orth 
bowing there before the social and religious de- 
formities of his time is really crucifying the man 
he believes himself worshipping. It was just that 
kind of reverence which sacrificed the brave reformer 
to the High Church of Palestine, and to the popular 
prejudices of his time ; and it is the same principle 
which in all times will devoutly immolate truth on 
the shrines which have ceased to represent it. It 
is that which will sacrifice human love to a marriage 
form, and human intelligence to a university cur- 
riculum, and liberty to an ancient order. 

We are swayed by the dead. Their skeleton 



CHRIST ON THE ASS. 



24 r 



hands are extended over the surface of society, and 
in obedience to them we druse ourselves and our 
children with calomel, and stab with lancets; we 
train the young as if they were to live in the age 
and country of Pericles or Augustus ; we read them 
ghost- stories and witch-stories out of the Bible more 
horrible than the contemporary ones which we 
severely prohibit. Our property represents the wills 
of the dead in its distribution ; our charities will not 
leave the channels they marked out, though through 
them they flow from the poor to the rich. And if 
even our Poets Laureate are found celebrating the 
churches of the dead, and the gallows, and war, and 
aristocracy, and, amid all the flaming swords before 
which tyrannies are falling, can find none to praise 
but the rusty Excaliburs of mythical ages, what 
chance is there for rescuing the people from their 
bondage to the Corpse-dynasty? If the light sent 
to us have turned to darkness, how great is that, 
darkness ! 

It is true, as has been said, that we are per- 
mitted to look upon the old symbols and repre- 
sentatives of religion with a reverence which in 
the age and country of Yoltaire would have been 
servility and cowardice ; but it by no means follows 
that this will continue to be possible to us. The 
abasement of the Wordsworths implies the con- 
temptuousness of the Voltaires. During the Twelve 
Days' Mission of the High Church in London, Vol- 

Q 



242 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE, 



taire edited the daily press. Holy vestments became 
" ecclesiastical petticoats." It will not do to tempt 
the retractile element in human nature too far. Ice 
will burn, and fire will freeze, and superstition will 
engender atheism. But unless we are to be given 
over to a mere succession of reactions, and to oscillate 
between donkey-worship and the bitterness which, 
with Voltaire, says of Jesus, " I pray you, let me 
never hear that man's name again !" we may turn 
from the two side-figures of Haydon's picture to 
honour one who seems to realise the true use of the 
ass. We can put our own bit in the mouth of the 
conservative animal, and make him bear us. As 
true chemistry came seated on alchemy, and 
astronomy was borne on astrology, we can hail the 
religion of an ideal manhood, though born among 
the beasts of the stall, and borne down to us on the 
religious animalism which moves only by reason of 
a devil's prong behind and a bundle of heavenly 
hay in front. 

The old creeds grew out of human nature as 
genuinely as weeds and flowers out of the earth. 
It is well enough that the gardener, whose business 
it is to pull them up, should despise them as pig- 
weed, wormwood, chickweed, shadblossom : so they 
are, out of their place ; but the botanist picks up 
the same, and recognises them as Ambrosia, 
Stellaria, Amelanchalia, Amaranth. Natura nihil 
agit frustra. Let us coax each to yield its last bud. 



CHRIST ON THE ^SS. 



243 



To that end the resisting force will help us : the 
reluctant sod and seed-shell will by their stubborn- 
ness give the stem mineral for its stateliness, and 
conserve a relation between root and flower which 
shall sustain the latter in its aspiration to the 
heavenly hues. 

A sage reminded his friends that the donkey was 
one of their poor relations. We must reflect, too, 
that he has seen better days. There was a time when 
the donkey was a masterpiece, and, turning from the 
ugly alligators and kangaroos which preceded him, 
Nature coyed his amiable face with the admiration 
of Titania. Since then higher animals have come, 
and have outrun and outwitted him ; but we ought 
not to mock him because he is down in the world. 
His family, though poor, is still large and respect- 
able in Church and State. Their family names 
now are Precedent and Dogma. We must, indeed, 
resist their pretensions to rule us, but not forget that 
nearly every precedent was once a landmark of pro- 
gress, and every dogma, compared with some pre- 
vious dogma, the watchword of a vanguard. There 
was a day when the dogmas of Satanic Power, Total 
Depravity, the Trinity, were advances upon yet 
gloomier theories, and had their martyrs. It was 
some Socinus who first imagined a Mother of 
Grod, a Channing who announced the doctrine of 
Purgatory. There was a day when slavery was 
the merciful alternative of the wholesale slaughter 



244 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



of captives, when the omission of woman from 
political equality meant her security from the 
terrors of military life, and when the gallows meant 
a restraint upon the wild passions of private ven- 
geance. Respecting now not what these are, but 
what they meant, remembering that we live in 
the reign of man, not in that of donkey, we may 
compel each to bear us to our Jerusalem. 



XXI. 



DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE. 



May they who celebrate thy name by wax-light at noonday 
tolerate such as are content with the light of the sun ! 

Voltaire's Prayer. 

There are blind ways provided ; the foredone 

Heart-weary player in this pageant world 

Drops out by, letting the main masque defile 

By the conspicuous portal. I am through — just through. 

Robert Browning. 



"DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE." 



m 



HROUGrH the beautiful garden of Voltaire's 
chateau at Ferney we walked, some of 
us with a sad reverence in our hearts; 
others came to " do the place," or " despatch " it, in 
ways facilitated by Mr. Cook's Tourist Tickets. 
Theology was present with approved antidotes to 
the poisoned atmosphere. " Voltaire was terribly 
afraid of lightning," said one. " When a storm 
came, he used to run and hide in that room." 
66 You are not quite right," returned a bystander ; 
" he was not afraid of the lightning, but, for fear 
of giving priests a new text to proclaim the divine 
wrath against free thought, he took precautions." 
" But he died a horrible death," said Whitecravat. 
" Not so horrible as Christ's," returned our Me- 
phistopheles, " though the priests did manage to 
make it uncomfortable, and their successors have 
managed to make it terrible." "You seem," 
remarked Theology, "to think Voltaire did well 
to unsettle human faith as much as he could." 



248 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



(e He hardly unsettled it more than Jesus and Paul 
and Luther did." " But they put something in 
the place of what they removed." " See there," 
returned the other, (! what Voltaire built up." He 
pointed to the little church, on which was written, 
(( Deo erexit Voltaire." " You smile ; but if, as I 
imagine, you are Protestants, you might without 
untruth write on your churches, " Erexit Voltaire." 
Unless he, or some man such as he, had written 
as he did, you would all have relapsed into the 
clutches of the Pope. He it was that placed 
reformation beyond reaction, and set you on the 
path where your children, if not yourselves, may 
one day find a Being who may be worshipped 
without a total degradation of the human soul. 
He who weeds the field raises the corn. Voltaire 
was as the eye of God on earth in his day, trans- 
fixing every error dishonouring to man ; he was 
a Sceptic." 

At the word Theology shuddered. 

" You shudder ; but have you ever considered 
the profound significance of that word Sceptic? 
The word a-xsitTakv means 6 to consider ;' it signifies, 
strictly, to shade the eyes for better vision. A 
Sceptic, then, is one who shades his eyes in order 
to look steadfastly at a thing. He will shade his 
eyes (thus !) of all but the light necessary for 
seeing, will protect himself from garish public 
opinion, will dismiss prejudice and self-interest, and 



" DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE:' 



249 



steadily examine each thing that claims his acqui- 
escence. There are many words of a similar cha- 
racter, gentlemen, which you may be accustomed 
to pronounce only as if you touched a serpent, 
which, however, have their fair origin. What is a 
c Latitudinarian' but one whose views have breadth ? 
What is a ( Freethinker ' but one who refuses to 
think as a slave ? And what is the 6 heretic ' but 
one who is resolved to choose (af^o-a;) the faith 
he will hold, instead of employing a priest to do 
his thinking and his believing for him? The 
dishonour which the Churches have brought upon 
these words is a confession that they have found 
that the ( considerer ' of their faith rarely ends in 
accepting it ; that the man of broad opinions is 
never content with their pin-hole outlook on the 
Universe ; that free thought is fatal to their fetters ; 
that the c chooser ' of his own faith is not often 
found choosing theirs." 

Theology slipped away affronted. The man 
whom it had aroused had, however, by this time 
a little company around him, attracted by curiosity. 
He was a queer figure, and as he spoke his chin 
seemed to become sharper, his nose to bend out 
like an interrogation, and his eyes shone like lamps 
from their cells, until I could almost fancy it was 
the portrait of Yoltaire himself come out of the 
little room where we had been gazing; on it, to haunt 
his old grounds again. He was about to leave us, 



250 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



but some of those present cried, " Give us another 
sermon !" A cynical smile came over his features 
as he turned again and spoke as follows : — 

" The time will come, ladies and gentlemen, 
when everybody will be amazed that intelligent 
men should feel wounded at a defence of the 
duty of mankind to inquire, to consider, to doubt, 
before building faith and life on any proposition. 
Theology, in desiring an unthinking adhesion, claims 
that we should give up the well-tried rule of every- 
day life, where it is only by testing things by 
doubts that we can come to correct conclusions. 
There are, indeed, great differences between men 
in this direction; as the English writer, Charles 
Lamb, says, ( The shapings of our heavens are the 
modifications of our constitutions, and Mr. Great- 
heart or Mr. Feeblemind is born in every one of us.' 
One man will weep in secret that he cannot believe 
the Incarnation or the miracles; another will swallow 
all mysteries, and only regret he hasn't more. One 
poor saint will grope through the world melancholy, 
doubting if he is regenerate, or whether he pleases 
God ; another is perfectly assured that he is of the 
elect, that he is God's darling, and gives himself no 
trouble about it. 

" Which of these is learning the lesson of this 
Universe ? Which is the really humble and sur- 
rendered soul? Let that be answered by our 
first deeper glance at this our mysterious Life, 



" DEO E REX IT VOLTAIRE? 



251 



where we find ourselves as in mid-ocean with 
neither shore in sight. The motto of the good 
Montaigne was, ( Que scais-je ?' Philosophy every- 
where echoes that question. While man is but a 
bundle of senses, he never doubts: Nature will 
first wean him, and that by causing him to doubt 
his senses. The child putting a stick in the 
water sees it broken; taking it out again, he 
sees it unbroken : his senses have deceived him. 
He will see stars nearly touching each other, and 
afterwards learn that they are billions of miles 
apart. He will hear a reply to his voice in the 
ravine, and discover no one there but himself. He 
will see a flat earth, and be compelled to believe it 
round. He will next discover that every piece of 
real knowledge began by a doubt cast on the senses, 
and discover that Doubt is the method of knowledge. 

" What is certain ? In all sciences the schools 
contradict each other. The historians are equally 
at variance. Caesar and his wars, Homer and his 
songs, these are the subjects of critical battles al- 
most as hot as any the one fought or the other sang 
of j — supposing, that is, that Caesar fought, and 
that Homer lived ! Is our existence even certain ? 
An eminent thinker has declared that the man 
who has never doubted his own existence may 
be sure he has no aptness for metaphysical in- 
quiries. Why should we believe what we see to 
have absolute existence, when each morning we 



252 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 

awake to the illusiveness of figures as fully believed 
in while dreaming ? — and dreams are not wilder 
than some things which pious and well-meaning 
people declare they have seen ! Nay, can we be 
confident of the absolute truth of our own rational 
conclusions? All of us have given up some opinions 
that once seemed as reasonable as those we now 
hold. 

" And even if any one thinks he has found 
a solid shore to this sea of ebbing and flowing 
theories and negations, shall he denounce the 
man who, unable to find such point of certainty, 
at least steers true toward what he believes to be 
truth ? I, for one, should call the Sceptic the ideal 
man, with Nature's finest clay and clearest flame in 
the make of him. He stands for justice against 
autocracy in the sphere of thought, holding the 
balances with unflinching though human hand. He 
will press established positions hard : their fallacies 
will appear if they have them, or if they have none 
they will be made firmer. The young discoverer 
knows that the current opinion was only the con- 
clusion of some previous young discoverer. Blind 
indeed must he be who does not see that such scep- 
ticism is the garment of a real faith ; that unbelief 
expresses itself by the sloth or indifference which 
sits down to the comfortable conventional creed, 
and cries out with alarm lest the sceptic should 
topple over God's throne ; while the great believer 



" DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE. 



*5-3 



is he that calmly trusts the solidity of the Universe, 
has no misgiving that an honest thought can mar 
its destiny, and ever follows the Truth (however 
thorny priests make the path !), though it make him 
a wanderer past the warm and inviting temples 
of Superstition. Think you it was pleasant for 
Voltaire to be hounded through the country while 
living, with the certainty of having his body kicked 
as if it were that of a dog after death ? It could 
only have been a living faith in his own heart, and 
the presence of a sustaining spirit of truth, which 
withheld the servile word that might easily have 
made him the darling of France. He stood to his 
post in the army of martyrs. 

66 The theologian referred to his death-bed. 
But let us recall the death-bed of the greatest 
freethinker who ever trod the earth. A young 
mechanic appeared preaching in the streets of 
Jerusalem, and with him the spirit of doubt was 
let loose as never before on this earth. His doubts 
led him when a child, it is said, to the doctors' 
feet, where he was found inquiring in the 
temple ; they led him to the wilderness, to the cold 
mountain and the midnight air. He brought the 
existing order into doubt. Pharisee and Scribe, 
Temple Service and Palace, Church and State, 
bear witness by their wrath that a formidable ques- 
tioning of all things is at hand. So his death-bed 
is a cross; his death-cry, f My God, why hast thou 



254 EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



forsaken me ! ' A terrible freethinker's end ! Yes, 
every drop of his blood was paid for free thought ! 
Every wound in his body, as we see it there, pleads 
that men should be large and free, unbelievers of 
all untruth ; that the soul should plant itself firmly 
on its instincts, and hesitate for ever ere it sanction 
what it suspects to be false, knowing that every 
falsehood is a seed of injury. Around that free- 
thinker's death-bed the voices of the darkness, agony, 
and death cry out to us all, e Be freethinkers ! If 
you must be so with a crown of thorns for your only 
reward, a cross your last bed, a mother's powerless 
tears at your feet your only sympathy, still be 
thinkers and be free ! ' 

" What love of such a being as that is worthy 
of him, or of the grandeur of your own soul? Is 
it the love of a trembling slave ? Is a blind, un- 
reasoning, therefore undoubtingj acceptance a fit 
homage to him who died for spiritual liberation? 

" Thou brave young man, to whom faculties are 
given to be the germs of other faculties that shall 
for ever aspire to the Infinite Light, cherish every 
doubt that comes of simplicity and truth ! As the 
little polyp shows on itself a dot, which draws to 
itself strength until it expands into another orga- 
nised animal, so the doubt that arises is the germ of 
some higher truth to be unfolded. Cherish every 
doubt ! To quarrel with these throes of the mind, 
whereby new truths are born, were to quarrel with 



« DEO EREXir VOLTAIRE."' 



*5S 



the fire-seethings at the heart of the world, which 
shall presently cast up through the boiling seas 
some fair island for the habitation of man. For 
there is nothing solid which was not once fluid, 
nothing stable which was not doubted and tried. 
Scepticism is the only path to a noble certainty. 
6 He,' says Lord Bacon, c who will commence with 
certainties shall end with doubts ; but he who is 
content to commence with doubts may arrive at 
certainties.' 

" This invites you, I know, to unrest of mind 
and sleepless nights; but who would evade the 
eternal laws, and say to the Spirit of Life, c Pass 
on ! animate the world ; kindle every star ; let the 
great heart beat from ocean to ocean ; let the power 
fill full every trunk, branch, leaf, vein of nature, 
— but leave me alone to sleep ! Let none of the 
divine currents fill or thrill me ! ' For you can 
write the history of this Universe on : the smallest 
leaf of the forest ; it is Motion and Rest : Rest the 
sleep, Motion the dream; Rest the prose, Motion 
the poetry ; Rest the sleeping princess, Motion the 
prince whose kiss unchains her spell. These enter 
the inward world as the twin sisters, Doubt and 
Certainty. There is nothing certain save through 
doubt of its contrary, nothing doubtful save by the 
greater certainty of that which brings it into doubt. 
This conflict means a more stable peace. 6 The 
wisdom that cometh from above is first pure, then 



256 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



peaceable.' In regions too cold for life the traveller 
desires to sleep ; his sleep were not more fatal than, 
to the mind, the certainty which is content to 
slumber amid the evil and ignorance in this world. 

" Yet this unresting life of the inquiring soul 
is not fair and good in itself, but only as the pro- 
phecy of a higher repose. It is thus with what we 
call the beauty of motion : motion is not the ele- 
ment of beauty, but in it we have a succession of 
attitudes and rests. The gazelle as it leaps presents 
a series of beautiful pauses : of any one of them we 
should weary; but each movement promises a 
position more full of beauty than the last. The 
aspiring human spirit suggests height beyond height, 
truth beyond truth, in its grand discontent with low 
and partial attainment. 

" The seer beheld a great sea of darkness 
beneath ; but above, a greater sea of light flowing 
for ever downward. Victorious Light ! — into every 
soul some ray enters, enough to warm us with love, 
enough to show the path before us. The shadows 
lift not, but the one ray that inspires the spirit 
which rises above fear and pain, and endures for 
the invisible truth and right, is the morning star 
of a perfect day." 



XXII. 

CONFESSIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 



K 



Kung-fu-tzee said, " Yeu, permit me to tell you what is know- 
ledge. "What you are acquainted with, consider that you know ; 
what you do not understand, consider that you do not know it : this 
is knowledge." 

The failing of men is that they neglect their own field to dress 
that of others. 

Chinese Analects. 



The awful shadow of some unseen Power 
Floats, though unseen, among us. 

Shelley. 



CONFESSIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 



Ill 



N a small room I found a few serious men 
and women gathered together to listen to 
1 a Positivist teacher. My heart was drawn 
out toward the preacher as he sat by his little table 
in the plain schoolroom, explaining his faith with 
tempered earnestness, without any rhetorical flourish, 
depending entirely upon his conviction, serenely 
assured that the universe moved harmoniously 
around that ! His worship was for Humanity, not 
as the shadow of any sublimer substance, but as in 
itself a great and essentially divine Being, capable 
of awakening the noblest enthusiasms and passions 
of the individual soul. The forms of this worship 
were old. There should be a calendar of saints and 
saints' days corresponding with those of the only 
Church the founder of Positivism knew ; the saints, 
however, were real, — -the great men and women 
whose thoughts and discoveries are moulding the 
present race of human beings. Yet the forms were 
just those which had impeded and persecuted and. 



260 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



crushed many of the very saints held up for our 
homage. It was strange to hear in this company of 
scholars the echo of some of the vulgarest conven- 
tionalities about woman, her place and education, 
about the relative value of sciences, and concerning 
liberty of opinion. The stupidest Tory would have 
heard this theory of woman with satisfaction. The 
man who spends his days seeking the insect which 
shall add the missing link in the chain of life stretch- 
ing from the zoophyte to Shakespeare, here found 
himself as a lackey in the presence of the superior 
caste of those whose discoveries put bread into our 
mouths. And because no man can demand tolera- 
tion for the belief that two added to two make five, 
therefore free thought in religion is a delusion ! 
The method was that of the Chinese shoe. Once 
decide that your infant's foot is not minimum, but 
maximum ; that society and science and religion, 
just as they are struggling into existence, are 
full-grown and ready to be stereotyped, — and 
M. Comte is in order. Not having reached that 
point, the Pilgrim felt the previous question moved 
in his mind, and went away glad that the teacher had 
about him chiefly the taught already ; hoping that 
the insect-hunter would still follow his fly as de- 
voutly as if it were an angel, that woman would still 
struggle for her place at the side of man in the 
work of the world, and that religious thought would 
not clip its wings for this latest cage. 



[CONFESSIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 



261 



Yet why this rebellion of Christians against 
Positivism ? All around us are Churches claiming 
for their several deities just the same enthralment 
which Positivism claims for its deity, Humanity. 
We are to follow ancient forms, to subordinate 
sciences, to celebrate saints ; and no one is to regard 
it as an impertinence, so long as it is all for some 
being imagined by ancient Jews or Greeks to be a 
god. Must we not conclude that the contempt of 
Comte's religion really marks the more disinterested 
criticism of Christendom upon its own method? 
Christendom has been brought by this French 
devotee face to face with its own forms, separated 
from association, and from the habits and interests 
which have gradually become implicated with them, 
presented in their naked reality; and it detests them. 

It was not very far from where the Positivists 
met that I found the ee Spiritualists" assembled. A 
speaker and medium from America was engaging 
their attention ; and their warmth, their enthusiasm, 
their implicit faith that they were in communica- 
tion with the World of Spirits, were sufficient to 
suggest the feeling that might have prevailed at 
some meeting of the earliest disciples of Christ after 
the crucifixion, as they listened for the sound of 
the trumpet and awaited the descent of heavenly 
hosts. Amid these believers, their tongues touched 
with pentecostal fire, their eyes radiant with in- 
visible visions, I sat among the blind unbelievers, 



262 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



and they prayed for our conversion with a sincere 
sympathy. The tables they saw floating to my 
eyes were still; their messages for me were de- 
monstrably false, their trance-revelations mere 
trash. Yet when they appealed to the history of 
the world for the veracity of their experiences, 
when they referred to the Witch of Endor, to the 
angels that opened prison-doors for Paul and Silas, 
to the dumb spirits, the possessed souls, the walking 
on water, told of in the Bible, how could I but 
sympathise with their indignation at the contempt 
heaped upon them by Christians ? Here are mul- 
titudes of living witnesses to events exactly similar 
to those which Christendom claims as its creden- 
tials. Here are unimpeached men and women, living 
in an age of scepticism and science, open to our 
tests and cross-examinations : are we to give them 
less credence than we give to people who lived in 
crude, unscientific, universally superstitious ages, 
and who cannot be examined at all? What ex- 
planation can be given of the aversion of believers 
in Christian supernaturalism from these con- 
temporary miracles ? Spiritism is only the appear- 
ance of their own mythology in a form detached 
from their associations and interests ; it is legendary 
Christianity brought for the first time to a point 
where it can receive their own impartial verdict; 
and we know now what the human mind in this 
age really thinks of it. 



CONFESSIONS OF CHRISTENDOM. 



263 



There is a story told on the Mississippi of a 
man of that region who, being on a steamer for the 
first time, saw an individual in the saloon, whom 
he addressed civilly, but received no answer. Re- 
peating his question, he still obtained no reply ; 
whereupon he uttered very decided and not com- 
plimentary opinions upon the personal appearance 
of his silent fellow-passenger. This individual, as 
it turned out, was unaccustomed to the brilliant 
mirrors of the American steamers, and he went off 
in happy unconsciousness that his contemptuous 
criticisms had been all upon himself. 

Positivism represents the hereditary body of 
Christianity, Spiritism its soul. The reception with 
which they are meeting plainly proves that, if either 
the forms or the beliefs of the common theology 
could at once disappear, they could never be re- 
established ; that they remain only because no real I 
or disinterested verdict upon them in their own 
names can at present be secured. The judges are 
parties to the case. For the present, however, it 
is much that we have virtually carried it against 
them, by confession of judgment, in the suit of 
Common Sense and Free Thought against the 
Spiritist John Doe and the Positivist Richard Roe. 
Our posterity will not fail to apply the principles 
thus determined to things not contemplated by our 
Christian denouncers of contemporary miracles and 
of systems restrictive of the spontaneity and free- 



264 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



dom of heart and mind. There are things that 
have a name to live, but are dead. A thousand 
witnesses to the resurrection of a dead man could 
not change the ownership of an acre before any 
Court in England. Is this a people that will con- 
tinue to shape its religion on the supposed testimony 
of a few Jewish fishermen, long dead, to events 
thus assumed to be incredible? 




XXIII. 



AN ENGLISH SINAI. 



A soldier of the kingdom of Ci lost his buckler, and, having 
sought for it a long time in vain, he comforted himself with this 
reflection : " A soldier of our camp will find it ; he will use it." 

Confucius* 

I could not live — couldst thou ? — to hear a truth 
Cry loudly in the heart, and strangle it. 
Were this the end, no other life beyond, 
Better to perish thus, our dust unurned 
(So it might nourish still a living flower), 
Bather than breathe such breath as hourly kills 
The truth that blooms within. 

Vivia Peepetua, 



AN ENGLISH SINAI. 



NGLISHMEN are still fumbling about 
Mount Sinai in the East. Even from the 
noon of the nineteenth century it is only 
through a perspective of six thousand years that men 
can see the summits where, amid smoke and flame, 
the laws of God are published. Yet Mount Sinai 
were a hillock but for the man that stood thereon \ 
and wherever a right and true man stands, there the 
earth rises heavenward, and the world trembles 
under the touch of God. 

The road by which the Pilgrim sought his Sinai 
lay across the lonely heath that stretches toward the 
little village of Christchurch. Lonely as it was, he 
felt himself, journeying thither, but the next in a 
procession of those who, in ages past and present, 
had found something to attract them through those 
barren fields. Into the sea stretches Hengistbury 
Head, where, in early days, Saxon, Dane, and Roman 
successively landed, and built fortresses from which 
they sallied forth to conquer and rule the land — 




268 



AN EAR THWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



each to disappear in due time, leaving some con- 
tribution of blood or power to be wrought into the 
character and laws of this people. 

B y many a superstition is this old region haunted. 
In the distance ri:5es St. Catherine's Hill. There, 
where the chapel of that Saint stood, the ghosts of 
the old pagans buried in surrounding mounds were 
wont, it was said, to throng, seeking to be shriven, 
and so rescued from purgatory. Legend also says 
that it was originally intended to build Christchurch 
on that hill, but after the materials had been carried 
thither they were borne at night by invisible agents 
to the spot where the church now stands. In the 
course of building a beam was found too short, and 
it was miraculously lengthened. This beam wae 
left uncovered, in order that the worshippers might 
see it, until very lately. The great square tower is 
a landmark in the distance, and as one approaches 
it the barren heath spreads into the green meadows 
that fringe the course of the Avon, which, having 
passed the homes of Sidney and Herbert, the altars 
of Stonehenge, and the soaring spire of Salisbury, 
has become serene in its silvery solitude, as it reflects 
the old church borne to its banks by the more silent 
stream of Time. For many generations are traced 
in its various architecture. The finest part is Nor- 
man, and has externally a beautiful lattice-work in 
stone, and a carved representation of cottage tiles. 
These architectural characters bear us back to the 



AN ENGLISH SINAI. 



origin of cathedrals. In early limes the rich could 
have in their castles or mansions each his private 
chapel or oratory ; but the poor must needs combine 
their humble means to provide a temple for them all, 
worthy the holy ones they adored. But this build- 
ing which held their common shrines and altars was 
at first but a larger cottage, with the same roof- 
tiles and lattices as the humble dwellings around 
it. The dormer windows of the cottage are still 
preserved in the steeple, which is the roof elongated 
so as to be a guide for pilgrims or wayfarers to the 
sacred home which was for all. But cathedrals 
have so long been separated from the life of the 
poor, — their significant signs have so long been 
mere architectural ornaments, — that those for whom 
they were originally built can no longer recognise 
any thread connecting their homes with them. The 
sexton of Christchurch explained that the tile- work 
was probably meant to imitate fish-scales ! The 
internal construction of the cathedral means just as 
little to the worshippers ; the nave is no more a 
navis, or ark of safety, the transept no more a hedge 
separating the sacred from the profane. Wherever 
these are now built, they are artificial ruins. 

The old reredos at Christchurch represents the 
pedigree of Jesus and the adoration of the Magi. 
Beneath is Jesse asleep : out of his loins grows a 
tree whose many branches curve into niches for the 
reputed ancestors of Christ. In the centre the 



Z70 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



mother reclines, upholding the infant, before whom 
the Wise Men, and with them a crowned King, are 
prostrate. From the time when the moral gran- 
deurs of the earth were represented in the bending 
of Scholarship and Royalty before the peasant who 
bore about him only spiritual splendours, pass we 
over many ages to the modern part of Christchurch, 
which holds the shrine we are seeking — the monu- 
ment of Shelley. There, beside the fatal boat, his 
head supported also by a faithful Mary, lies the 
scholar who would not bow to the one before 
whom his ancient brothers came from the East 
to bend. His face finds in this marble the repose 
which the world decreed he should only attain in 
death. Perhaps it is because the ancient positions 
of the holy child and the king are now reversed, and 
the knees of the Church-Christ have become quite 
supple before aristocratic privilege, that the most 
notable object in this Christian Cathedral is the 
memorial of one on whom, while living, the Chris- 
tian world shrieked out curses. He who replied to 
such curses that he had rather be damned with 
Plato than saved with those who anathematised 
him, has here his cenotaph among those whose only 
records are that they died under the blessing of the 
Church. In this old haunt of superstition its direst 
foe has his monument ! Should this marble form, 
in the soft twilight, throb with the life and con- 
sciousness of Shelley, possibly he would not feel 



AN ENGLISH SINAI. 



271 



any nearer to the symbols around him, but rather 
prefer the old persecution to the homage secured by 
the potency of a baronet's demand. 

Indeed, a modern Spiritist might easily suppose 
that the phantom of Shelley had been already at 
work in the choir, where old carvings represent a 
fox in the guise of a priest preaching to a flock of 
geese ; a farmer praying while a solemn dog laps 
his bowl of milk behind him ; and a king and a priest 
conspicuous in hell. At any rate, we may be sure 
that these were carved by the Shelley principle 
in Nature ; and such ornaments in the church of 
the eleventh century implied an infidel's memorial 
in that of the nineteenth century. Yet, could he 
walk these old aisles, uncongenial as he might find 
all his contemporary environments, the poet might 
bring with him a perception of a subtle relationship 
to those whose aspirations built the gray walls, and 
to those who, from windows passionate with heavenly 
light, look with warm glances upon his pale marble. 

The poet, says Schiller, is the son of his time. 
The poets who appeared on the horizon in the 
earlier part of this century were not the morning 
stars of the new era, but rather the fiery shapes 
about an era going down in blood. Of them one 
alone from the evening star of a setting is recog- 
nisable as the morning star of a rising day. By his 
side is Byron, in whom the ages of egotism reach 
their final flower and perish; with Shelley comes 



272 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



the first streak of the day of Humanity. The one 
will have his private sorrow ride him like a wild 
foaming steed driven by a demon; the other will 
have his grief spring up in human sympathy, his 
wrong signify every man's right. 

Were our Sciences equal to rightly reporting 
the embryology of Shelley, many a phenomenon in 
the present mental and moral condition of England 
would be made plain. A magician in his Field 
Place nursery dressing up his sisters as demons 
to obey his potent wand; an alchemist in Sion 
School experimenting to find the elixir of life ; a 
practitioner of the Black Art at Eton — where as 
yet Chemistry is a prohibited study — engaged, as 
he confesses to the terrified tutor^ in " raising the 
Devil ;" a mysterious boy who will not fag, and has 
that young world crying at his heels, " There goes 
mad Shelley !" a lover already, and writing with 
the beloved the romance of Zastrozzi, — he has drawn 
some drop of sap from every stratum of superstition 
beneath his feet, and passes them by swift transmu- 
tation to the incipient radicalism which breaks the 
shell at Oxford and walks forth a horror to students 
and professors. 

There follows a prelude of ominous dreams. 
Oxford consists at the time of a number of professors 
who are busy milking a veteran and barren cow 
for students who assiduously hold a sieve for pail. 
Their labours are suspended for a moment by the 



AN ENGLISH SINAI. 



273 



apparition of a young gentleman, son of a Member 
of Parliament, who goes about cursing the King, 
denying the existence of God, and predicting the 
extraction of food for the millions from air and water, 
the instantaneous communication of thoughts over 
any distances, and the universal travelling by air. 
It is not, of course, a long work to put this wild 
creature on a stage-coach, and send him off, before 
proceeding to work with the heifer and the sieve 
again. It is true that the laws have prematurely 
decided that an Oxonian shall not be burnt for 
writing an atheistic tract, but there still remain 
exile from college, exile from a father's house, and 
exile from the heart that is nearest. 

Now let us raise our thanks to those who alone 
never fail us, — the blind conservatives ; to the pro- 
fessors who gave us a prophet whom they might 
have made into a metaphysical bookworm ; to Miss 
Harriet Grove, who resigned us her lover to be the 
lover of mankind; to Sir Timothy Shelley, M. P., 
who enabled us to get out of his proposed politician 
a champion of Humanity. It makes one tremble to 
think that Shelley was once a baronet's son, under 
the roof of Oxford, at an age when, as in so many 
other cases, the Spirits might have been whispered 
out of him ! How much we owe to Scholastic stu- 
pidity can be especially appreciated by a generation 
which has seen a Prime Minister, long dwarfed 
under the spell of Oxford, released by its suicidal 

s 



274 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



simplicity, rising to a stature knightly enough to 
grapple with the greatest ecclesiastical wrong of his 
country, and to raise the flag of rationalism over 
the Episcopal Bench ! Yes, Oxford, — thou dull 
whetstone of Saladin scimitars, — in our praise to 
Conservatism, the great nether stone of the mills of 
Grod, we cannot forget thee until thou also shalt be 
ground exceeding small ! 

Shelley, said Leigh Hunt, seemed like a spirit 
that had darted from its orb and found itself in ano- 
ther planet. iS He was pious toward Nature, toward 
his friends, toward the whole human race, toward 
the meanest insect of the forest." " I never knew 
such an instinct of veneration," says Hogg. Robert 
Browning has described Shelley's poetry as " a 
sublime fragmentary essay toward a presentment of 
the correspondency of the Universe to the Deity." 
This was the man for whom Oxford had nothing but 
a curse ! This was the " atheist " for whom the 
England that adored George the Fourth as the 
finest gentleman in Europe could furnish no home ! 
Such reverence, wonder, worship, never before or 
since fed with their sacred oil a purer spirit; he 
ascended bravely the smoking mount, and returned 
to the calf-worshippers below with the light of 
eternity on his face, and they knew him not ! 

Shelley was the first-born of a generation of souls 
commissioned' to revolutionise the thought and faith 
of England. After him there was a Shelley in every 



AN ENGLISH SINAI. 



275 



sane man born of an English mother, and the siege 
against Superstition began, never to be raised. 
The tragedy of Shelley's life was the warning of the 
Church to all who should ever attempt to think 
freely and bravely. It was a proclamation of piracy 
against every barque that should cast its old moor- 
ings and sail the seas with God. His life was never 
lived; it was scattered like bits of some exquisite 
mosaic never pieced together. They alone know the 
splendid design who can carry out in imagination, 
and colour with the pigments of their own hearts, 
the great forms suggested by the fragments of his 
song and his life. Such— so has our Christendom 
steadily declared^— such, so outlawed and ruined, 
shall be every life which is hurled against us and 
our dogmas. Do we require more lamentations 
over " Lost Leaders," more recantations in Scot- 
land or Cambridge, more humiliations before Con- 
vocation, to prove how potent is the threat? Bend 
or be broken ! is still the word of the Church to the 
scholar yearning for his ideal life; live the life, 
think the thought, we prescribe, or perish with all 
your hopes unfulfilled around you ! 

But, sad and fragmentary as was his life, it shines 
out like a rainbow above those who have surrendered. 
Beside their finest embroidered ensigns we lift this 
strip torn by shot and shell from the banner of a 
great cause, and know that there is still room for 
the lilies to blossom upon it. Lo, beneath the 



276 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



tattered life and name and work of Shelley let the 
scholars of this day gather, and take their oath of 
knighthood. What part has a scholar with the 
savage creed that wears the scalp of Shelley at its 
belt ? What place has he in the assembly of those 
who count the belief in an angry, jealous, arbitrary 
Jehovah to be pious, and call the aspiration which 
soars above the idols of fools atheism ? Why should 
the man of culture exclude from his social circle the 
man who talks bad grammar, or dismiss the servant 
who believes in witches, but welcome the surpliced 
or kid-gloved believer in hells, devils, and Balaam's 
talking ass ? The scholar is not the retained advo- 
cate of the party that pays best. He is not the 
attorney for commerce, nor the professional casuist 
of those who would combine the advantages of con- 
ventionality with those of simple truth. Better he 
should again be a hermit than dwell in society at 
the cost of honour. As yet, alas, though subtle as 
the serpent, our Scholarship has also its double 
tongue, uttering now that which is true, next that 
which is sordid. From the day when Shelley was 
banished from Oxford, no scholar has remained under 
the flag of the common Christianity save through a 
visible servility. But it is spiritual perjury ! If 
we demand that the banker shall be honest in money 
matters, that the soldier shall be brave, that the 
judge shall be just, shall we be satisfied that he who 
is consecrated to Reason shall weakly or meanly 



AN ENGLISH SINAI. 



277 



part its sacred raiment among those who would 
feign trick out their lucrative creeds or customs 
with its divine sanctions ? 

Shelley brought the Orthodoxy of England to its 
Judgment Day. Up to his time there were great 
and honest scholars in the Churches ; but the cruelty, 
the coarseness, the ignorance inherent in those 
Churches was then revealed, the falsehood was 
exposed; and only by some kind of bribery, con- 
scious or unconscious, can any genius or real 
culture be found there longer. We ought to be 
able to depend upon the honour of the Scholar 
not to compromise the purity of the light he is 
set to feed and guard. There is needed a Scholar's 
caste, removed from the world of Self-seekers; a 
brotherhood of those whose verdict is the dictate 
of absolute reason and rectitude ; the fraternity of 
those who, amid a world that weighs eternal verities 
in their relation to gold and fashion, steadily say, 
" Unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou 
united ! " 

We have lived long since Shelley's time; the 
brave thinker finds many a warm hand to clasp his 
where the exiled poet found but few, and those the 
hands of fellow- exiles ; but superstition still reigns 
over the conventional world : it is cruel as ever ; and 
he can hardly be sure that he has fought the good 
fight, and kept his trust, who does not feel that he 
has read a chapter of his own experience in the life 



27§ AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and drunk of the cup of 
which he drank. For, though no man knoweth his 
grave unto this day, he saw God face to face, and 
brought upon the tables of a broken heart the laws 
of those called out of spiritual bondage. 



XXIV. 

GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 



This is the Law of God, that virtue is the only thing that is 
strong. 

All the parts of human life, in the same manner as those of a 
statue, ought to he beautiful. 

Sayings of the Pythagoreans. 

One voice alone, one harp alone, begins ; 
But soon joins in the ever fuller choir. 

The people quake : they feel 

A glow of heavenly fire. 

One day, when rest my bones beside a fane 
Where thus assembled worshippers adore, 

The conscious grave shall heave, 

Its flowerets sweeter bloom. 

Klopstock. 



GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 




QUARTER of a century ago a prophet 
stood in his London pulpit and uttered 
these words : — 
" In that old St. Pancras, with its ancient burial- 
ground, at a remote corner, those who are disposed 
for such a pilgrimage may find a spot, an unobtru- 
sive unostentatious tomb, built some forty years 
ago by William Godwin for Mary Wollstonecraft ; 
and where, some few years ago, those who had been 
united in life became blended in the grave. When 
people can rightly estimate their benefactors ; when 
nobility is judged of by intellect and spirit, and not 
by title and station ; when woman's wrongs are 
righted, and man's rights are recognised; when 
achieved freedom throws its light and lustre back 
on those who toiled through the transition-time, 
and were but as stars that rose and set again before 
the coming day, — then will crowds frequent that 
now solitary corner ; laurels will be planted around 
that humble monument, and sculptured marble will 



282 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



tell what public gratitude awards to those who lived 
and wrote and spent the best energies of their lives 
in prejmring the way for man's redemption from 
social and political bondage." 

In a beautiful churchyard at Bournemouth 
sculptured marble now tells that there rests the 
dust of the author of Political Justice, the authoress 
of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and their 
daughter, the widow of the poet Shelley. The 
clergyman who, chiefly at his own expense, built 
this charming church, and now preaches in it, 
naturally resisted the importation of such unhal- 
lowed remains and uncongenial phrases into its 
vicinity. But there are certain forces stronger 
than clergymen; and there, close to the Keble 
window, sharing the light that kindles the windows 
glowing with the faces of saints and apostles, 
stand the tombs of three people who, while living, 
were types of moral heresy. 

In the church, I listened as the priest read con- 
cerning the lives and sayings of some of those 
through whose fair forms the light fell upon his 
page, and reflected on those spirits whom Dante 
saw in the lower world, who could see plainly 
things in the far past, and even in the future, but 
to whom the present was all confusion. And my 
response to him was : " Sir, among all those holy 
ones who adorn your Church, none more patiently 
lived and suffered up to their crowns of light than 



GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 



283 



those you so reluctantly admitted to their repose 
under the cypresses out there. And if these faith- 
ful ones — dreaded by the clergy in their day, by 
you hallowed with every tint of glory — could live 
and move, be you sure they would gather around 
the grave you dread, and say, 6 This is our brother, 
these are our sisters.' " 

The Luther of Morality has not yet appeared. 
The Reformers of the Seventeenth Century over- 
threw the Theology of the Church, but they neces- 
sarily left the morality of the Protestant world 
essentially monastic. The morality of Protestantism 
is unrelated to the age in which we live ; and so 
every wrong finds it easy to secure the defence of 
pulpits. Theology brings out its texts to strengthen 
the slave's chain, to oppress woman, to make the 
Sabbath a prison for the poor. We are grown-up 
men and women in commerce, in steam locomotion, 
and telegraphic intercourse : in our estimates of 
right and wrong we still dwell in the cloister. It 
follows from this preservation of a dead ethical 
body that there is hardly any form of wrong which 
cannot flourish without conflict with the old fences 
of Church or State. Selfishness, coldness, inhu- 
manity, hardness of heart, they are all quite secure ; 
yet their reign promises the reaction which shall 
lead on the Ethical Reformation. The value of the 
Reformation under Luther was the degree to which 
it turned the attention of mankind from observances 



284 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



to virtues, from rites to practices: the morality- 
related to it, and yet to come, must turn man from 
ordering his conduct with reference to other worlds 
and their awards, and hold him to his obligations to 
this world, to his fellow-man, and his own heart. It 
will shift the arena of life from heaven to earth ; it 
will direct all moral effort toward man who can, 
instead of toward God who cannot, be benefited by 
it; it will declare all possible duties to be duties 
to man — man in us or outside of us. It will thus, 
at the foundation, blend what have hitherto been 
separated — Religion and Morality. 

Religion is essentially man's duty to himself. 
On the instant that a man has reference in his con- 
duct to some satisfaction conferred upon Grod, his 
act is an act of superstition, for his deity is assumed 
to be dependent on man for his happiness, and is 
thus regarded as subject to the passions of men. A 
man is religious who reveres his own soul sufficiently 
to be loyal to its dictates, to cherish and cultivate its 
faculties, and to preserve it from guilt. But this 
fidelity to the sacred self is the centre of any true 
fidelity to others ; only by disobeying the laws of 
our own nature can we wrong others. Separate our 
relations to others from self-truthfulness, and our 
service to them, though it may be what they desire, 
is harmful to them — the mere catering to their pre- 
judices, or indulgence of their faults — and therefore 
essentially immoral. 



GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 



285 



Supposing our eyes, then, fairly turned to the 
conditions and needs of the planet upon which we 
must live and work, we look upon humanity no 
longer as an aggregate of souls that may be damned 
or saved hereafter, but as a society of human beings, 
each endowed with faculties whose highest object is 
to be unfolded and devoted freely to their definite 
and appropriate work, as it is the object of a torch 
to give light. To this view a man is lost when his 
faculties are stunted into incompetency ; to save a 
soul means to reap from it what it can do for the 
cultivation and well-being of this world. Morality 
thus becomes the law and means whereby human 
faculties may secure their growth and their right 
application. That would be a moral law which 
should secure this, that an immoral law which should 
prevent it. 

That which is now called Morality directly and 
deliberately stunts or even ruins the faculties of 
man, and on principle. This will appear to those 
who consider its standards of nobility, commercial 
success, Sabbath-keeping, expediency ; but beside 
the graves of Bournemouth I revert only to that 
point upon which our hereditary monastic morality 
is most stern and uncompromising — marriage. Alas, 
how many graves are there in the world over which 
might be carved that grim idol, marriage, about 
whom nearly all our social superstitions are en- 
trenched, with his blood-reeking altar ! 



286 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



What is the moral difference between the pur- 
chase of a wife for a night in the Hayniarket, and 
the purchase of one for life in St. George's Church ? 
There is everything to be said for the Hay market 
proceeding as compared with that at Hanover 
Square ; it does not pretend to be religious, it does 
not systematise itself in the forms of a home. Pro- 
stitution may be guilty of many sins ; the marriage 
of convenience, the marriage for an establishment, 
the diplomatic marriage, commit the same sin once, 
but it does not end. Do you say, Judge not ? Nay, 
judge not you, that you be not judged ! So long as 
Society cares only for the marriage-licence and the 
priest's blessing ; so long as it receives with a smile 
the woman legally bought, and commends Mary 
Wollstonecraft to the ' Thames river because her 
true love does not fulfil its forms; so long as it 
holds that chastity demands the sacrifice of every 
woman who has in any instance disregarded its 
laws, and makes the street or the brothel the only 
possible refuge for thousands purer than many of 
those who shut the door in their faces ; so long as 
it prefers secret sin, intrigue, the hate in the 
chamber behind the smile in the drawing-room, the 
daily lesson of hypocrisy learned by children, and 
whited sepulchres called homes, to honest divorce ; 
so long as it will encourage the young man and 
maid who have made an incongruous marriage 
to starve their hearts and waste their lives rather 



GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 



287 



than confess the mistake, and seek out the hearts 
needed for their perfection so long will those 
whose eyes are cleared of superstition see the throne 
of Marriage, like that of Dahomey, resting upon 
human skulls. 

Nothing but superstition ever sacrifices human 
beings to institutions. The origin of the marriage 
superstition is pagan. The vestal, doomed to a 
living burial if her vow was broken, reappeared as 
the nun. The old idea of conciliating a heavenly 
autocrat by taxation of herds, by roasted meat, 
by offering up the fruit of the body for the 
sin of the soul, survived in the asceticism which 
made eunuchs of the priests of Cybele, the 
eunuchs " for the kingdom of heaven's sake " 
commended in the New Testament, the Skopsi 
of the present day in Russia, the celibates of the 
Eoman Catholic priesthood, the Bachelors of Eng- 
lish Universities. Those who could insult every 
mother by declaring that the only good man was 
born of a virgin, naturally pronounced marriage a 
concession to human weakness, an indulgence which 
could be made tolerable only by the authority of 
the Church. Hence the " sacrament " of marriage ; 
and hence the superstition which lingers about it in 
regions once governed by the Church. 

Like every other superstition, it is suicidal. 
Permitting the minimum of freedom in its regula- 
tion and duration, marriage finds the young already 



288 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



dreading it. The number increases of those who 
shrink from stooping to a doorway which leads to 
what may be, indeed, a happy home, but may be, 
too, an iron prison from which there is no escape 
but over the ruins of character. Formosa now 
excites sympathy; presently she will gain respect. 
When finally she shall deserve respect, when she 
also shows that she can be faithful as lover and 
mother, the lock-and-bolt system will break down. 
Society will ere long be glad enough to assimilate 
contracts between man and woman to contracts 
between partners in business. Then love will dis- 
pense alike with the bandage on its eyes and the 
constable's aid. And as for the thousand phantoms 
in the distance, — -the deserted wives, the abandoned 
children, &c, — though the worst of them are less 
terrible than the realities of the present, we will not 
be frightened by them into any distrust of the laws 
of the universe. The new seed will shape itself into 
sufficient branches and leaves; the rains will not 
cease, nor the sunshine. When wants come, wants 
will be met. Even the poor African has learned 
that "if the Alguana-tree will die to-morrow for 
lack of water, water will come to-morrow." The 
organic forms around us did not spring panoplied 
from the brain of any Jove; each fibre, antenna, 
organ, records a circumstance encountered and an 
energy put forth to meet it. The adequate marriage 
will begin its growth when mankind set themselves 



GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 



289 



to discover what will help man and woman rather 
than what will help God. When it is felt that wife- 
murder is a heavy price to pay for a literal con- 
formity with the supposed sentence of Jesus con- 
cerning divorce, we shall consult reason in the 
matter rather than the crude reaction of a pure 
soul against the corruptions of a period. 

Am I told that woman dreads the easy divorce? 
Naturally, for the prejudices and arrangements of 
Society have not been adapted to the easy divorce. 
Let her know that, under the changed sentiment 
which shall follow changed law, she will meet with 
sympathy where now she would encounter suspicion; 
let her know that she will, if divorced from one she 
loves not, have only her fair share of the burdens 
entailed by the original mistake; and she who of 
all persons suffers most if the home be false will 
welcome the freer marriage. 

In England we smilingly walk our halls of Eblis, 
covering the fatal wound ; but our neighbours across 
the Channel are frank. Their moralists cannot blot 
out the proverb that "Marriage is the suicide of 
Love." Is it any truer here than there that, as a 
general thing, the courtesies of the courtship survive 
in the marriage ? " Who is that domino walking 
with George?" asks Grisette No. 1, as reported by 
Charivari. " Why," returns Grisette No. 2, " do 
you not walk behind them, and listen to what they 
say?" "I have done so, and they do not say a 

T 



290 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



word." " Ah, it is his wife." But what might be 
Greorge's feeling if he knew that his wife might 
leave him some morning? " If conserve of roses 
be frequently eaten/' they say in Persia, "it will 
produce a surfeit." The thousands of husbands and 
wives yawning in each other's faces at this moment 
need not go so far for their proverb. If it be well, 
as 'it seems to me to be, that this most intimate 
relation between man and woman should be made 
as durable as the object for which it is formed will 
admit, surely the bond should be real to the last, 
a bond of kindliness, thoughtfulness, actual help- 
fulness. So long as the strength of the bond lies 
simply in the disagreeable concomitants of breaking 
it, so long as it is protected by the very iron hard- 
ness which makes it gall and oppress, what need is 
there of the reinforcement of it by the cultivation 
of minds, the preservation of good temper, and con- 
siderate behaviour? Love is not quite willing to 
accept the judge's mace for his arrow. When the 
law no longer supplies husband or wife with a cage, 
each must look to find and make available what 
resources he or she has for holding what has been 
won. We may then look for sober second thoughts 
both before and after marriage. Love, from so long 
having bandaged eyes, will be all eye. Every real 
attraction will be stimulated when all depends 
upon real attraction. When the conserve becomes 
fatiguing, it will be refreshed by a new flavour, not 



GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 



-9 



by a certificate. From the hour when a thought 
of obligation influences either party to it, the mar- 
riage becomes a prostitution. 

These things are not written against the real 
marriage, not to defend licentiousness or levity in 
the relations between the sexes. They are written 
in the interest of a conservation of that purity and 
sincerity which marriage originally aimed to secure 
between them, but which must now be set aside in 
a spirit equally solemn with that which first named 
it a sacrament. Nothing here written is so severe 
an arraignment of it as the satire of the cynical 
press and the club, which find in the bazaar of 
daughters, and the girl and the wife " of the 
period," their favourite target; or let what I write 
be read by the light of the Divorce Court. It 
is premature to say what the new marriage is to 
be : Necessity — God and Nature, that is — must 
instruct each step in our progress toward that. 
The inadequate institutions which have been be- 
queathed us out of the past are the cast seeds of 
withered flowers. The resuscitation of the same 
flowers is impossible. Meanwhile, it is but a false 
conservatism which says, Let us live on the seeds 
as they are ; the true says, Let us sow them ; let 
us part with them, that we may obtain what is 
really in them. Only a few can live on the seeds ; 
as they shall rise from the dust, they will be a 
harvest for mankind. A true faith would fearlessly 



292 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



sow the very stars for seed if their autumn had 
come. 

All religion and all ethics are summed up in 
Justice, In religion, Justice appears holding her 
sacred balances between all our passions and 
faculties, demanding that I shall not give to one 
part of me what is due to another. Devotion shall 
not rob healthy nor the senses reason, nor intellect 
the affections. The selfish faculty may destroy 
the harmony of character, as the face may be de- 
formed by being heaped into a monstrous nose. 
In morality, Justice appears forbidding the artificial 
inequality between man and man. Immorality is 
such by not respecting the equal right of another. 
The criminal seeks happiness, which is legitimate ; 
but he seeks it by destroying the happiness of 
others, which is illegitimate. The lawful con- 
ditions by which any desired object may be 
obtained simply represent the rights of others, by 
which every faculty is limited, or rather directed ; 
to violate those conditions is so much injustice. 
But this injustice is also an injustice to the wrong- 
doer himself. Therefore there is no difference 
between religious and ethical law. Whether it be 
manifested as the sacrifice of health to lust or 
to piety, — or of the permanent to the transient, — or 
of the public good to private ends, — or of Humanity 
to a national interest^ — or of labour to capital, — or 
of the people to privilege, — the one old serpent 



GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 



293 



with tail in mouth encircling the tree of Life is 
for ever Injustice. 

But the Grolden Rule has now no hell-fire with 
which to enforce its command to the individual ; 
and the worn-out legal machinery which we have 
inherited cannot overtake the ingenuities of selfish- 
ness in commercial or social life. There is hardly any 
one who fears the poor Devil, especially since his 
nonsuit in English Courts; and there are few 
oppressions which cannot conform to the letter of 
our ancient laws. 

It is true that our situation is not comfortable. 
Unhappy is the king-crab in the interval between 
its shell just cast and that not yet formed. But a 
fact cannot be groaned or raged out of existence. 
We can only console ourselves with the reflection 
that the increasing immunities which selfishness 
finds, as fears and phantoms fade, and prisons are 
cheated by the waxing light, are themselves 
disciplinary. Liberty will not fail to tax her 
gifts. These crumbling laws were reached through 
a long experience of lawlessness ; they represent 
the progress of man through a wild liberty to self- 
control. The forces which guided man through 
many formidable experiments to his social contract 
cannot perish with their forms. He will find that 
edged tools will still cut, and fire burn. And as with 
increased knowledge and liberty life becomes more 
valuable, and its resources more various, the dangers 



294 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



of self-mutilation, the horrors of the penalties for 
which priests can no longer promise heavenly com- 
pensation, will but shift the flames from a possible 
future to an actual present. If we have lost 
Satan as a " bogie " for weak minds, we have also 
lost him as an apology for our sins. If we can 
sway the balances of judge and jury by a sufficiently 
weighty lawyer's fee, and grind the poor within the 
formulas of law, and oppress woman by our sove- 
reignty in our " castles," Ave cannot help thereby 
inviting the human heart to follow us beyond the 
traditional confines, and laying the foundations of 
new and adequate laws. The fox reveals, and so in 
the end mends, the hole by which he escapes. We 
are indebted to the street robbers for our street 
lights, to tyranny for our republics. In the Mills 
of God there are nether as well as upper stones, 
and to the former as much as to the latter is due 
the fineness of the flour. 

For, lo, the one great law, Justice, is to the moral 
what gravitation is to the physical world : no planet, 
no pebble, but must obey it. " Law," saith the 
Brahmin, "is all hands and feet; it is all faces, 
heads, and eyes ; and, all ear, it sitteth in the midst 
of the world, possessing the whole. It is the inside 
and the outside, the movable and immovable of all 
Nature. From the minuteness of its parts, it is incon- 
ceivable. It standeth at a distance, yet is present. 
It is that which now destroy eth, now produceth. 



GRAVES AT BOURNEMOUTH. 



295 



It presideth in every breast. Justice, being over- 
turned, will overturn." He who knoweth this, 
though seeming weakest, shall move firmly as the 
sun on paths where the strongest who know not 
justice shall fail. 



XXV. 

THE CATARACT AND THE 
RAINBOW. 



The dice of God are always loaded. 

Greek Proverb. 

He my servant is dear unto me who is free from enmity, the 
friend of all nature, merciful, exempt from pride and selfishness, the 
same in pain and pleasure, patient of wrongs, contented, constantly 
devout, of subdued passions and firm resolves ; ... of whom man- 
kind are not afraid, and who of mankind is not afraid ; . . . who 
is unsolicitous about the event of things. 

Bhagavat Geeta. 



The moving Finger writes, and, haying writ, 
Moves on : not all your piety and wit 

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, 
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it. 

With Earth's first clay they did the last Man knead, 
And there of the last Harvest sowed the seed : 

And the first Morning of Creation wrote 
What the last Dawn of Reckoning shall read. 

Omar Khayyam. 



THE CATARACT AND THE 



RAINBOW. 



STOOD by Niagara, gazing on its smooth 
pitch, and its islet of green, holding their 
own steadfastly above the macl dash and 
deafening roar of the waters. The winds came 
howling out of the cavern beneath : on the pendent 
harp they changed to melodies. Above all stood 
the shimmering rainbow, and its sweet prophecy 
said, — Over this mad rage hovers the circle of 
inviolable law. No drop of the cataract but gathers 
to its sphere, and rises or falls, by the law that 
shapes and moves the gliding planets overhead. 
The winds too have their eternal channels. Fear 
thou not, therefore, the wild roar of human passions, 
nor the seemingly unchained freaks of human will. 
Climb to their table-rock, and over them shall be 
seen bending the luminous arch that softly chains 
them in their pit. 

What is it in the idea of Necessity from which 
we recoil ? Alas, cries one, it makes us machines, 
the good man a machine turning out good, the evil 



300 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 

man a machine turning out evil; there is no longer 
responsibility ; praise and blame are alike idle : nay, 
why should we act at all ? why not fold our arms, 
and bow before the events which transcribe what is 
written on the iron leaf ? 

Not of much worth is the argument from conse- 
quences — not properly, indeed, an argument at all. 
Is a thing true ? If so, its consequences sink into 
questions of personal convenience. The extent to 
which it will affect our prejudices or habits is not 
more admissible, in the consideration of a truth, 
than the consequences to our capital at the bankers 
of assuming 2 + 2=4 are admissible in determining 
arithmetical law. Yet, since reason is so often 
paralysed by the phantoms it conjures up, one 
may condescend to remind the timid that men are 
very apt to be mistaken in estimating the results 
of opinions they do not hold. Every belief has an 
environment of related beliefs. If the believer in 
free agency were able to isolate the belief in neces- 
sity from its related outlooks, and attach it to his 
own present opinions, it might paralyse his activi- 
ties ; but, that being impossible, let him remember 
that, when he has arrived at the point of the road 
reached by the fatalist, he may see other visions 
now withheld from him. Paul, Mohammed, Crom- 
well, Milton, the Puritans who founded New 
England, John Calvin, Frederick the Great, Carlyle, 
Emerson, have all been earnest believers in Neces- 



THE CATARACT AND THE RAINBOW. 301 

sity; has it destroyed their energies? The truth 
is, that instead of men having their self-reliance or 
their power paralysed by believing in destiny, it 
has in every age proved to be a source of inspiration 
and force ; their lives have been solemnised by the 
faith that they were recording on earth the decrees 
of Heaven. Each such believer has felt himself 
not merely a man engaged in what might or might 
not turn out effectual, but rather an organ of the 
inevitable — as it were, the hand of God himself 
touching and moulding the world. 

But this, it may be said, is the effect the doctrine 
of Necessity has had when given great men to work 
upon. How, then, would it logically affect common 
people ? First, we should cease to take credit for 
our good actions. Egotism would have less place 
in our work. Next, we should be less angry with 
the wrong-doer. We should trace his vice to some 
malformation. We might restrain him as we would 
a tiger, but with as little indignation as we have 
for the tiger. These new principles might tell in 
calmer estimates, and in the abolition of all punish- 
ments which bear traces of vindictiveness. But 
would the absence of pride and revenge, the acces- 
sion of humility and charity in human character 
and in our laws, be such a terrible evil ? 

We do not choose our temperament, which 
makes us grave or gay, conservative or radical, 
religious or worldly, and determines the degree and 



3° 2 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



character of our influence. It may depend upon 
the race whose blood is in us, on the climate in which 
we are born, on our forgotten ancestors ; but where- 
soever forged, it is a link no man ever broke. 

We do not choose our intellectual gifts. New- 
ton's father cannot make him a haberdasher, nor 
Turner be made a barber. On this fatal difference 
of gifts depend poverty and wealth, success and 
failure ; and their outcome is in the condition of 
Science, Literature, Art, and Religion. 

Is man any more free to choose good or evil, 
right or wrong ? The Creed will depend upon the 
country, the time, the family, amid which he is 
born. Here he will be a Christian, there a Moham- 
medan. The like facts will determine his morality. 
Here he will have one wife, there four; here he 
will help his neighbour, there he will eat him. Or 
if we find the stone, bronze, iron, and steam ages 
surviving side by side in our cities, each will be 
faithfully reflected in our statistics, in our courts, 
and in our drawing-rooms. 

But may not man cultivate or control what is in 
him? Ma} r not the bad disposition be corrected 
somewhat, and the dull mind quickened ? Behold 
the next bar of Fate — Circumstance ! Whether 
mind and heart will be restrained or developed 
shall be determined by the lot without, conspiring 
with the motive within. Is the lot a den of vice ? 
— a home of luxury ? Will the man have means of 



THE CATARACT AND THE RAINBOW. 303 



education, leisure to think ? or, if the lot be poor, 
will there be the inherent power of Burns or Frank- 
lin to rise above it? The chain within coils into 
that without. 

How, then, comes the word "freedom" into our 
language? and how is Dr. Johnson to be answered 
— " Sir, we know we are free, and that's an end of 
it " ? Our reply is, we know we are not free, but 
that our action is determined by motives. Our feeling 
that we are free is part of the general illusion which 
is an element in our destiny. " Nature is helped by 
no mean, but Nature makes that mean ; " and her 
sure plan is secured by the consciousness of volition 
up to the point where a higher energy can work. 
The child does not see beyond its game ; Nature 
looks to the training of its limbs and faculties, and 
humours its fancies. Man's praise and blame are 
the terms of a larger game ; but they have no deeper 
root than the consciousness which attests one thing 
to the ignorant, another thing to the enlightened. 
Dr. Johnson's reply begs the question; the neces- 
sitarian does not know he is free, but the contrary. 
The rudest and crudest belief which is deep enough 
to control instinctive action may claim the support 
of what is called consciousness as if it were a special 
faculty, but which has never been shown to be any 
faculty at all. The feeling of freedom in action 
and power of choice is part of the destiny of per- 
sons in certain stages of development; but beneath 



304 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



works the inevitable fact. Why do we praise or 
blame, why reward or punish ? Because we know 
that men are impelled by motives ; and praise, blame, 
reward, punishment, supply the strongest motives. 

Why, then, do we seek to influence men toward 
this or that course of conduct, when we know that 
they will surely do what they must ? Because we 
must. 

Cannot a man do what he chooses ? Yes ; but he 
can only choose under limits. He cannot choose to 
subsist on poisons, nor to leap over the moon. 

But what are these walls by which we find our- 
selves enclosed ? They are eternal laws. From 
them we derive all our real freedom. The man who 
has a mill to be turned finds in the laws of falling 
water the enlargement of his power. Marrying the 
feeble individual hand to electricity, gravitation, 
light, heat, its power is indefinitely multiplied. 

On the other hand, suppose our ignorance, our 
passion, were really unchained; suppose we could 
inflict a real harm on the universe. Were that 
glad tidings? What mean poets when they sing, 
" He maketh the wrath of man to praise him," — or, 
" Truth crushed to earth will rise again or prophets 
when, in the face of seeming evil and oppression, 
they recognise the steady triumph of Justice ? They 
see that circular line which the far-seeing Greeks 
drew around all their representations of human con- 
flict, the line that cannot be overpassed in a uni- 



THE CATARACT AND THE RAINBOW. 



3°5 



verse which has an all- compelling purpose. If we 
ascend into Heaven, it is there ; if we make our 
bed in Hell, it is there. Adieu, Doubt ! He who 
recognises the beautiful laws which cannot be 
marred will, amid the seeming chaos of selfishness 
and wrong, dwell in calmness, and see them 

Forging, with swart arms of offence, 
The silver seats of innocence. 

The captain does not fear that some day waves will 
lose their power to sustain ships. The merchant, 
loading his vessel on the sand, has no misgiving that 
some day the tide will fail to reach the water-mark. 
The man of faith has no fear that evil will turn 
out to be the end of the universe. Happy as a 
co-worker for the aim that cannot fail; raising his 
private scheme into harmony with the universal 
purpose ; renouncing all merit, as he sees his abso- 
lute dependence for all nobleness upon forces and 
principles to which his personality is surrendered ; 
pitying, but never fearing or hating, those who are 
morally deformed, — he who has caught a gleam 
from the beautiful Necessity wherewith we are 
surrounded, draws near to the starry rest, and is 
lulled by the music of storms. Snows alight on 
him as crystal crosses and petals ; hails he will see 
as masked sunbeams. 

The rainbow rose and fell as the cataract raged 
against its rocky walls — rose and fell, and sometimes 

U 



306 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



seemed broken and flitting away like a luminous 
snake. But evermore it returned, and, seeming to 
yield, held the monster fast in its soft circle. Even 
so, as the great American has reminded us, 
when the gods could not bind the Wolf Fenris 
with steel or with mountain weights, the soft silken 
thread around his foot held him. It bent with his 
bendings, and was concealed by its minuteness. In 
his wildest range of ferocity it was with him — spun, 
possibly, of his own hair. So Niagara sends up the 
spray for its rainbow. So Tyranny draws after it 
its own Nemesis. So every wrong rouses the right, 
and danger excites vigilance, and Humanity moves 
on its orbit, balanced between action and recoil. 
Whoso knows this will carry the might of gravita- 
tion into his purpose; he will match the elements 
with their like in himself ; his self-reliance will be 
fatal, conspiring with the inviolable winds and the 
stars in their courses. 



XXVI. 



THE UNCHURCHED 



Make thyself dust to do anything well. 

Saadt. 

If you want to find the true magic pass into heaven, scores of 
rival professors press round you with obtrusive supply : if you ask, 
in your sorrow, Who can tell me whether there be a heaven at all ? 
every soul will keep aloof and leave you alone. All men that bring 
from God a fresh deep nature, — all in whom religious wants live 
with eager power, and who are yet too clear of soul to unthink a 
thought and falsify a truth, — receive in these days no help and no 
response. 

James Maetineau. 

Blacken thy heavens, Jove, 

"With thunder-clouds 

I honour thee ? For what ? 

Hast thou the miseries lightened 

Of the down-trodden ? 

Hast thou the tears ever banished 

From the afflicted ? 

Have I not to manhood been moulded 

By omnipotent Time 

And by Fate everlasting, — 

My lords and thine ? 

Goethe's Prometheus. 



THE UNCHURCHED. 



IP 

mm. 



SAT amid the circle of ancient stones at 
Stonehenge ; then visited the fine Ca- 
thedral at Salisbury, and paused in its 
circular Chapter-house ; then, coming out, watched 
some boys at play. The lads had drawn a diagram 
of many compartments on the ground, and, hopping 
after their oyster-shells, kicked them from point to 
point till the circular base was reached. The dia- 
gram was a very fair ground-plan of a cathedral. 
The urged oyster-shell is, as some antiquaries 
say, a travesty of the ancient initiate passing from 
point to point — catechised here, baptised there, 
repeating his shibboleth further on, anointed, 
confirmed, until at last he is received into the 
inner circle. 

The thing in common with Stonehenge, Salis- 
bury Chapter-house, and the boy's game was the 
circle. Church is probably Circ, with the c 
Italianised. The circle was of old the type of the 
Deity, as reflected in the round horizon, the sun 
and moon. Dancing dervishes, fiery Bel-wheels, 



3 1 o AN EAR THWARD PILGRIMA GE, 

circular processions, all repeated on earth the 
celestial motions : and the Church became the 
visible abode of Him who had not jet been seen, 
as "the circle whose centre is everywhere, whose 
circumference nowhere." 

Thus in the beginning of Christianity, so soon 
as it was able to describe a circle for itself, we 
find the saints within, the profane without. The 
initiated could only be admitted by passwords. The 
passwords, gradually collected, form the creed. 

The centre from which the first circle or church 
was described was its pretension to hold the one 
Ark of safety. Under Luther's blow that circle 
was broken up into points. One of these points 
became the centre of the next circle ; it was the 
authority and infallibility of the Bible. Science 
has destroyed that. What will be the next circle ? 
— the Church of the future ? 

In its long history one fact stands out, though 
the Church has been strangely unconscious of it; 
namely, that while by mysterious rites in one 
age, and by dogmatic confessions in another, it has 
been initiating its proselytes, it has itself been 
indoctrinated and pressed from phase to phase by 
the great human circle around it. Its hard line 
drawn about the believers has been again and again 
broken, widened, reformed, in spite of its fierce 
hostility, though it now cherish among its shib- 
boleths the alterations forced upon it by pressure 



THE UNCHURCHED. 



from the unchurched world. Its growth has been 
like that of a tree. The young sap and the 
fresh integument of the living; season harden 
into the trunk as the last annual ring added ; and 
this too shall be surrounded by a ring that is not in 
the tree, but in the sod, the clouds, the light. When 
the new circle is to be formed around the old 
Church, the living forces will be found gathering 
outside of it. The Voice will be heard, not in the 
Synagogue, but crying in the Wilderness. The 
people will be moved by aspirations of which the 
Church knows nothing. Where it once controlled, 
it will be led through reluctant compliances. Such 
are the signs fatal to Churches. Compromise will 
always stretch the existing circle to the utmost; 
but at last it must break up into new centres, in 
some one of which enough vitality may be found for 
the development of the new organisation. 

Such is the critical period that has overtaken the 
Christian Church in our own time. The tremen- 
dous fact, which cannot be argued or raged out of 
existence, is, that the great interests of our time 
gather about the unchurched world. Nobody can 
pretend that the leading literature, science, philoso- 
phy, or art, are within the Church. Our greatest 
scholars and thinkers are what the Church is com- 
pelled to regard as infidels. The rising generation 
is sitting at the feet of men of genius who train it 
into antagonism to the Church. No Church is now 



312 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 

found leading in any great social or political move- 
ment: the movements concerning woman, land, 
education, go on without their aid, and generally 
against their hostility. In due time the Churches 
will take credit for the successful issue of them all ; 
but for the present they chant their creeds before 
mouldy altars, and stand on the canvas of our time 
like Michael Angelo's " Entombment" — a group of 
blurred faded figures, of which the only one plainly 
discernible is a Dead Christ. 

What will be the circle wide enough to enclose 
the excommunicated Nineteenth Century ? We 
have had a Church of Priestly Authority, a Church 
of Biblical Authority, a Church of Christ ; there 
is nothing left for us but a Church of God. In 
that common term of all religions, which priests 
have preserved in their superstitions only as 
a seed is kept through ages in the shroud of a 
mummy, we may behold the germ of the next reli- 
gion of mankind. All our Evangelical Alliances, 
our Protestant Unions, our (Ecumenical Councils, 
will but tear its mouldy vesture more and more 
into shreds ; all our scepticism, philosophy, and 
science will but more and more warm that seed into 
life. Simple Theism has but few churches now ; it 
is a newly-discovered and as yet unexplored conti- 
nent; but so was America a little while ago. They 
who, like Plymouth Pilgrims, have settled in the 
winter time on its rocky verge know little as yet of 



THE UNCHURCHED. 



3*3 



its prairies, savannahs, and Eldorados; but they 
already see that it is to be the next great home of 
human hearts and thoughts. While they reject the 
creeds, the Science and Literature of our age are 
reverent. This shows that the marriage of Faith 
and Reason is already consummated ; and to their 
nobler offspring the Future belongs as an inherit- 
ance. Heart and Intellect, so long separated by 
Superstition, shall accord in spirit, and to their har- 
monies the steps of men shall move as move the 
planets above to the music of blended Wisdom and 
Love. 

Utopian Pilgrim ! thine is but one vision among 
many ; thy neighbour's prophecy is that there shall 
be no Church at all in the Future. He sees bands 
of men leagued for practical earthly ends — Tem- 
perance, Education, Equality of Women, Sabbath 
Reform, and the like ; but no society for the culture 
of the religious or moral sentiment. 

It is even so. And, happily, the energy that 
has built the fair forms we see above, around, be- 
neath us, will still work on beyond our visions, and 
may be trusted to the end. Bit by bit they grew, — 
these exquisite forms, — each a sum of creative de- 
mands and supplies. Not a feather, not an antenna 
among them, but records the new environment 
which evoked it. No race in its zone, no zoophyte 
in its rain-drop, but is the exact epitome of its 
circumstances. The changed form gathers all 



314 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



that went before it ; the forms become fluent under 
the same need that shaped them, and Nature con- 
serves herself by change. That which passes, passes 
because it is no longer necessary. The traditional 
creed passes with the need which formed it. Every 
fossil in the earth tells its story. It is not necessary. 
Men are virtuous without it. It no longer implies 
self-denial or any divine passion to believe it. 
The cross has become golden, and may be coined 
into money. The virtues it once implied gather 
with the freethinkers and reformers who will not 
bow to it. The impulse which separates them 
from Christendom is the centre of a new creation. 
What that new creation will be we can, indeed, only 
imagine ; but we know that the Spirit which built 
Christianity when Judaism fell, which built Pro- 
testantism when Romanism crumbled, cannot be 
crushed under the ruins of any temple. We know 
that, like the bird with the tropic flower on its 
wing, the bear with the polar snows on its coat, the 
form will correspond to the characteristics of the 
age in which it shall appear ; that its science, litera- 
ture, liberty, philanthropy 3 will all be raised and 
repeated in it. We know that, as man bears in his 
brain all the animal passions and instincts that pre- 
ceded him, no altar that ever flamed, no incense, or 
chant, or rite, or prayer, will fail to pour its essence 
into the new creed, though a single word be enough 
to utter it. The old hunger of the soul, its old need 



THE UNCHURCHED. 



of raiment and shelter, have not survived the blights 
of superstition and the frosts of denial to fail us at 
the last. 

Onward, ye children of the new faith ! The sun 
of Christendom hastes to its setting, but the hope 
never sets of those who know that the sunset here 
is' a sunrise there. 




XXVII. 



THE REJECTED STONE. 



The principles of the superior man commence with the duties of 
common men and women, but in their highest extent they illuminate 

the universe, 

Chinese Analects. 



At the last day men shall wear 
On their heads the dust, 
As ensign and as ornament 
Of their lowly trust. 

Hafiz, 



THE REJECTED STONE. 



OME years ago I was wont to repair on 
Sunday mornings to Smithfield to hear 
the orators of the open air discourse on 
the great problems of these times. There is no 
theory or heresy conceivable by the human mind 
which was not ventilated on that hallowed acre. 
No eloquence that I could find in any Church 
seemed to me comparable with the rudest speech of 
these unkempt infidels, who showed what fruit 
stakes of wood, quickened by fires fed with human 
blood, may bear after some generations. The 
butchers who now occupy that spot never hewed 
and hacked meat more cleverly than their prede- 
cessors cut up dogmas; and the market hardly com- 
pensates for the loss of this unroofed cathedral, or 
furnishes more genuine food for the body than was 
then dealt out to the mind of the artisan. But its 
worshippers betook themselves to the parks and 
squares. Here, however, they were interrupted; 
the police were empowered to make them " move 
on." One Sunday morning I saw in one of the open 



3 2 ° 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



spaces a man walking backward, pursued, apparently 



on. Thus for a year or so they moved, until the 
new railway arches at St. Pancras were built ; under 
these the preachers, lecturers, and disputants are 
now permitted to collect themselves and their 
thoughts. There I have followed them, and listened 
through many a summer evening to such wisdom as 
can alone lift up its voice in the streets. 

A few orthodox preachers appear on the scene, 
to pray and sing and utter the old inducements of 
future woe and bliss : but they bring their listeners 
with them ; and it is a performance of actors too 
poor to have engagements, with the cast-off scenery 
of regular establishments, and hardly excites more 
than the smile of those who pass by to attend the 
real attractions of the place. As one approaches, 
he might fancy that he had got into a courtyard of 
Bedlam. A confused din of voices coming from the 
centres of contiguous groups, each struggling with 
the other in the air, pelts the wayfarer like a con- 
sistency of rain, snow, and hail. But let one stop 
and take heed ; he will find himself at a focus in 
the whispering-gallery of the world. There is 
no question discussed in the great Universities, 
or Church Councils, or Parliaments, but is dis- 
cussed here. 




THE REJECTED STONE. 



On a certain night I stood for an hour between 
three groups, one of which was discussing the au- 
thority of the Catholic Church, the second the mira- 
cles, the third the existence of God. Archbishop 
Manning never urged a stronger argument for the 
necessity of a Church authorised to interpret the 
Bible than w T as there uttered by one of the poorest 
of his flock. " You admit the authority of the Bible 
as the word of God?" he asked of his antagonist. 
"Certainly." "But you say every man must put 
his own interpretation upon it?" " I do." "Now, 
suppose a lawyer were to go before a Court of Law 
with a case, and claim the right to put his own inter- 
pretation on the laws of England, what would the 
Judge say to him ? He would say, Sir, these laws 
have been interpreted by our Courts before you 
were born. I have got to follow the precedents. 
I can't set my own private opinions, much less 
yours, against the former decisions of this Court. 
And if it has been found necessary to establish 
Courts to interpret the laws of England, is it 
not just as necessary to have an authority to inter- 
pret the laws of God ? " 

While the poor Protestant was fumbling about 
for his reply to this I gave heed to the assailer of 
miracles. " Why don't they happen now ?" he cried. 
" Because the time of miracles is past. They were 
needed to call the attention of the people to Chris- 
tianity then." " Well, aren't they needed to support 

x 



322 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Christianity now ? J ohn Stuart Mill don't believe it, 
Professor Huxley don't believe it, the foremost men 
of this age don't believe it. There are thousands on 
thousands of people in London who pay no attention 
to it. Now, you just raise to life out of the grave- 
yard one of our dead children in the name of Christ, 
and the Churches won't remain empty." Such was 
the echo of Strauss, of Parker, of Renan, which 
found its way through the lips of an artisan in 
patched clothes. But the largest crowd was 
gathered around one who was fiercely denying the 
existence of Grod. " If there is a God, why are you 
permitted to suffer? Why do ignorance, crime, 
and wrong run riot through the land ? What would 
any man among you do if he were omniscient and 
omnipotent? Would he not be found in every 
home of misery and want and sickness, relieving 
distress, restoring health ? Would he not remove 
from the world tyranny, ignorance, and sin ? Are 
we to suppose that there is an omnipotent Grod who 
doesn't show as much benevolence toward his crea- 
tures as a man would who had the same power ? 
Look at the earthquakes that swallow men up 
like flies," — and so on, with much more of the 
same sort. 

Here were the sheep ; where were the shep- 
herds ? Chanting empty services to emptier pews ; 
standing beside their cold altars and crying, Ho, 
all ye that hunger, come and hear us read about 



THE REJECTED STONE. 



323 



bread that was sown, harvested, and eaten in ancient 
Palestine ! 

Seest thou these great temples ? There shall not 
be left of them one stone upon another which shall 
not be cast down. Their builders have rejected the 
stone which evermore breaks to its own measure all 
that falls upon it, which grinds to powder that upon 
which it falls. The oath of the Universe is pledged 
that only that shall stand which has for its corner-stone 
Man. Amid cathedrals built for the splendour of 
Popes or the glorification of God, institutions raised on 
the assumption that the people were made for them, 
not they for the people, dogmas holding the human 
heart and reason fit sacrifices for them, the steadfast 
forces of Fate have quarried from the rejected 
instincts and necessities of the masses that rude 
block lying in the mud at St. Pancras which shall 
one day be recognised as the corner-stone on which 
alone any temple can rest securely. The Voices at 
St. Pancras are not the voices of ignorant working 
people ; they are, to those that can receive it, the 
voices of Elias, of half-clad John in the Wilderness, 
which must first come. Only before one who, in 
conformity with human nature, can increase, can 
their fatal negations decrease. 

The worship of the Nazarene peasant and car- 
penter has its Avatar to-day in the interest gather- 
ing about the little and the lowly.* At last an age 
has arrived which begins to understand the secret 



324 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



revealed to St. Augustine that " God is great in 
the great, but greatest in the small." 

First came Science, the one true representative 
of the Apostolic Succession in this age, reversing 
all estimates of high and low. Studious rather of 
actual flies than of possible angels; turning from 
the infinite to search into the infinitesimal ; finding 
the philosopher's stone in every pebble ; circum- 
navigating the rain-drop and reporting its curious 
tribes ; pursuing insects as ardently as suns ; read- 
ing in flowers the laws of constellations ; tracing the 
bursting of cosmical rings and the generation of 
worlds in a spinning drop of oil ; exploring primeval 
forests in frost-pictures on window-panes ; following 
each step in the ascent of the worm to man ; showing 
the consent of solar systems to the motion of a 
finger, — Science has come to this generation 
wearing on its head the dust, and has taught us 
to see in that dust a crown more glorious than 
ever adorned the brow of Royalty. 

Next came Poetry, turning at last from the 
emptiness of the glittering, to the treasures of the 
leaden, casket: Burns, and the "wee, modest, crim- 
son-tipped flower" disturbed by his plough; Words- 
worth, with his reflector turned to the field, holding 
a celandine ; Hood setting to sweet minors the 
sighs of the sempstress; Leigh Hunt and Keats 
competing as laureates of the cricket and the grass- 
hopper ; Carlyle rising to song once, as the moth 



THE REJECTED STONE. 



3^5 



found its pyre in his candle; Goethe twining the 
mystical tendrils of souls about the little Gypsy 
Mignon ; Browning telling of the destinies of em- 
pires bound up with the carols of the barefooted 
Pippa from the silk-mills; the tender humanities 
of Beranger, of Lowell, of Whittier, and of Walt 
Whitman, who shows the Leaves of Grass as fit 
subjects for his epic as Homer found for his the 
Heroes of Troy. 

The whole transcendental movement of New 
England, which gave to America its only distinctive 
literature, which sketched its ideal in Brook Farm 
communities and realised it in the abolition of 
Slavery, unfolded beneath the breath of the Seer 
of Concord, who knew — 

There is no great, there is no small, 
To the Soul that maketh all ; 
And where it goeth all things are, 
And it goeth everywhere. 

I am not unmindful that the chief Minnesinger 
of our time still dresses his Muse in court costume, 
and still rehearses to charmed drawing-rooms the 
deeds of kings and knights ; nor that those he has 
inspired are more listened to as they sing of the 
Medeas, Atalantas, and Tristrams, than Clough lin- 
gering with the peasant- dance amid the heather, or 
Allingham and Barnes, whose morning glories climb 
on cottage-doors, or Robert Buchanan setting the 
footfalls along the Strand to melody. But may not 



326 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



the drawing-rooms be under an illusion about their 
favourites ? As the Pre-Raphaelists, seeking an ex- 
tinct Art, ploughed the furrows of an Art to come ; as 
Culture, recoiling from vulgar comradeship, travels 
eastward till it gets westward, — even so, by many 
blind ways, even those most antiquarian, the dream 
of Poetry leads to the one Shrine. Tennyson w T ill 
voyage with Ulysses rather than with Paddy on his 
emigrant ship ; but at last on Californian sands 
they will sit together, and see the old world with 
the same distrust, and say, " We will return no 
more ! " That which has enabled Tennyson to 
touch the heart of his age is the degree to which 
he has represented its vague and profound scepti- 
cism. Subtly interfused with nearly every poem 
he has written is the spirit he has received from the 
popular unrest, the moral misgiving and intellectual 
doubt, whose waves are steadily drowning all that 
cannot float. The Woman's Rights Reformers find 
their texts in The Princess ; and In Memoriam is the 
sustaining air for all Left Wings. The secularist 
lecturer takes from the " Lotus-eaters " his burden 
against the present, and from cc The Two Voices " 
his curtain against the future. Yainly will men 
fight their shadows. Carlyle is still compelled to 
further the human equality he made necessary when 
he tore crowns of painted paper in pieces ; Father 
Newman stands powerless before the Frankenstein 
of Rationalism he conjured up. The Spirit of the 



THE REJECTED STONE. 



3 2 7 



Age is the divinity that shapes our ends, and 
cares little for our rougdi-hewing of the same: it 
can allow seeming reactions and illusive eccen- 
tricity ; for, whatever tacks the ships may make, 
its magnet is hid near every compass, and will 
bring them all to one port at last. 

The novelist, — the real preacher of our times, — 
once minding only high things, now aspires to 
things of low estate. The romance of the past 
gathered about the castles and mansions of the 
great, and sought the company of lords and 
ladies. But these are now left to penny novels 
read by ambitious domestics, incurious concerning 
their own familiar lot. The romances which have 
really made an impression on this age have been 
those which have had for their themes the opera- 
tives of factories, the artisan radical, the dens of 
Field Lane, the Toilers of the Sea or Les Miserables 
of France, or the poor Uncle Toms of the Planta- 
tion. The success of Charles Dickens is the most 
significant literary phenomenon before us. This 
graduate of Fleet Street has woven the haunts of 
wretchedness and sin in London into a texture of 
pathos, humour, and beauty. No one can walk 
those streets with the same eyes as before since he 
plunged into their turbid life and emerged with 
hands laden with pearls — pearls from the hearts of 
thieves and outcasts. There is a divine sparkle in 
every heap of rubbish. It is as if our coal-dust should 



328 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



crystallise to diamonds. Humanity, forgetting the 
fine people of Walter Scott and Bulwer, turned to 
acknowledge a debt to this figure-head of London 
deeper than is due to all the sermonisers around 
him. Not the Churches, but him, we thank for the 
brightest rays that shine with Christmas mornings. 
Children unconsciously twine the laurels of their 
happier life about the brow which has laughed 
Squeers with his ferule out of existence, and caused 
the flowers of gladness to bloom along their paths, 
so long blighted by Puritanism : Chadband and 
Stiggins read on their merry faces a reign of 
terror, others the radiance of a new era in our 
civilisation. And when at last that grave lay open 
in the ancient Abbey, to close at last upon some 
part of all of us, and the people and their children 
came and heaped it with flowers, each flower was 
a symbol of the fragrance, the tints innumerable, 
which had bloomed at his touch out of lives and 
hearts that were dead, through him made alive 
again. 

Lastly, what has been the history of Art in 
England ? With splendid antecedents, from decorat- 
ing Southern palace and cathedral with gorgeous 
tableaux, Art came hither to suffer a decline gradu- 
ated according to the liberation of the people from 
the past it expressed, up to the day when a par- 
ticularly English Parliament ordered the finest 
pictures in the country to be burnt. No longer to 



THE REJECTED STONE. 



3 2 9 



be dragged at the wheels of the most exquisite of 
chariots is this unromantic Englishman; he will 
betake him to the driving of his own ugly cab. 
How shall the flower thrive when the stem is 
broken ? The Englishman had utterly lost the 
faith which had culminated in the art of Raphael, 
concerning whom he cried, Away with your Ma- 
donnas ! give us your fat naked women instead of 
them ! So Raphael, and the long line of post- 
Raphaelists, gave those mixtures of paint and 
patriotism, of figment and pigment, which passed 
here for high art, until the true prophet of Eng- 
lish Art came ; meek and lowly he came, riding 
on an ass ! 

But at this point of our pilgrimage we reach 
the house of an Interpreter, at whose feet we may 
well sit in silence for a space. 

" Near the south-west corner of Covent Garden, 
a square brick pit or well is formed by a close-set 
block of houses, to the back windows of which it 
admits a few rays of light. Access to the bottom 
of it is obtained out of Maiden Lane, through a low 
archway and an iron gate ; and if you stand long 
enough under the archway to accustom your eyes to 
the darkness, you may see on the left hand a narrow 
door, which formerly gave access to a respectable 
barber's shop, of which the front window, looking 
into Maiden Lane, is still extant, filled in this year 
(1860) with a row of bottles, connected in some 



33° 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



defunct manner with a brewer's business. A more 
fashionable neighbourhood,. it is said, eighty years 
ago than now — never, certainly, a cheerful one — 
wherein a boy being born on St. George's Day, 
1775, began soon after to take interest in the world 
of Covent Garden, and put to service such spec- 
tacles of life as it afforded. ~No knights to be seen 
there, nor, I imagine, many beautiful ladies ; their 
costume at least disadvantageous, depending much 
on incumbency of hat and feather, and short waists ; 
the majesty of men founded similarly on shoe- 
buckles and wigs ! . . . ( Bello ovile clov' io dormii 
aomello : ' of things beautiful, besides men and 
women, dusty sunbeams up or down the street on 
summer mornings ; deep-furrowed cabbage-leaves 
at the greengrocer's ; magnificence of oranges in 
wheelbarrows round the corner, and Thames' shore 
within three minutes' race. None of these things 
very glorious ; the best, however, that England, it 
seems, was then able to provide for a boy of gift ; 
who, such as they are, loves them — never, indeed, 
forgets them. The short waists modify to the last 
his visions of Greek ideal. His foregrounds had 
always a succulent cluster or two of greengrocery at 
the corners. Enchanted oranges gleam in Covent 
Gardens of the Hesperides, and great ships go to 
pieces to scatter chests of them on the waves. That 
mist of early sunbeams in the London dawn crosses 
many and many a time the clearness of Italian air ; 



THE REJECTED STONE. 



33' 



and by Thames' shore, with its stranded barges and 
glidings of red sail, dearer to us than Lucerne lake 
or Venetian lagoon — by Thames' shore we will die. 
. . . He attaches himself with the faithfullest child- 
love to everything that bears the image of the place 
he was born in. No matter how ugly it is, — has it 
anything about it like Maiden Lane, or like Thames' 
shore? If so, it shall be painted for their sake. 
Hence to the very close of life Turner could 
endure ugliness which no one else of the same 
sensibility would have borne with for an instant. 
Dead brick walls, blank square windows, old 
clothes, market-womanly types of humanity — any- 
thing fishy and muddy, like Billingsgate or Hun- 
gerford Market, had great attraction for him ; black 
barges, patched sails, and every possible condition 
of fog. . . . No Venetian ever draws anything 
foul ; but Turner devoted picture after picture to 
the illustration of effects of dinginess, smoke, soot, 
dust, and dusty texture ; old sides of boats, weedy 
roadside vegetation, dung-hills, straw-yards, and all 
the soilings and stains of every common labour. 
And, more than this, he could not only endure, but 
enjoyed and looked for litter, like Covent Garden 
wreck after the market. . . . Even his richest vesre- 
tation in ideal work is confused. . . . The last 
words he ever spoke to me about a picture were in 
gentle exultation about his St. Gothard, e that 
litter of stones which I endeavoured to represent.' 



332 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



The second great result of this Covent Garden 
training was, understanding of, and regard for, the 
poor, whom the Venetians, we saw, despised ; whom, 
contrarily, Turner loved, and more than loved — 
understood. . . . Reynolds and Gainsborough, 
bred in country villages, learned there the country 
boy's reverential theory of ' the Squire,' and kept it. 
They painted the Squire and the Squire's Lady as 
centres of the movements of the universe, to the end 
of their lives. But Turner perceived the younger 
Squire in other aspects about his lane, occurring 
prominently in its night scenery as a dark figure, 
or one of two, against the moonlight. . . . ( That 
mysterious forest below London Bridge ' — better 
for the boy than wood of pine or grove of myrtle. 
How he must have tormented the watermen, be- 
seeching them to let him crouch anywhere in the 
bows, quiet as a log, so only that he might get 
floated doAvn there among the ships, . . . which 
ships also are inhabited by glorious creatures — red- 
faced sailors, with pipes, appearing over the gun- 
wales, true knights over their castle parapets. . . . 
Among the wheelbarrows, and over the vegetables, 
no perceptible dominance of religion ; in the narrow 
disquieted streets, none ; in the tongues, deeds, 
daily ways of Maiden Lane, little. Some honesty, 
indeed, and English industry, and kindness of heart, 
and general idea of justice ; but faith of any national 
kind, shut up from one Sunday to the next, not 



THE REJECTED STONE. 



333 



artistically beautiful even in those Sabbatical exhi- 
bitions, its paraphernalia being chiefly of high pews, 
heavy elocution, and cold grimness of behaviour. . . 
This religion seems to him discreditable — discredited 
— not believing in itself; putting forth its authority 
in a cowardly way ; watching how far it might be 
tolerated ; continually shrinking, disclaiming, fencing, 
finessing : . . . not to be either obeyed or combated 
by an ignorant yet clear-sighted youth ; only to be 
scorned." 

Thus was trained the first artist whose eye was 
at win with the country, through which it ran to and 
fro like the eye of the Lord, — a veritable Peer, by 
divine right, of England. Art thou he that should 
come ? Behold, the poor have the Gospel preached 
to them. The apotheosis of cabbage-leaves, sailors, 
fish-women, is at hand ; these shall decorate sea and 
land, and shine in the firmament. 

Turner was himself blinded by excess of light, no 
doubt ; and the eyes, long trained to copying dark 
old pictures by altar-lights, gazed upon this dawn 
of English art only at cost of seeing a spot on the 
heart of its sun, or of sore eyes. But ancient art 
sank fossilised to its stratum when Turner began to 
paint England — its Labour, its Sorrow, and Death. 
The Pre-Raphaelist Brothers are the first to see 
that the old flowers have withered, must be hence- 
forth honeyless for ever ; and they will wander back 
to the old clime and age whence the seeds of them 



334 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



were wafted. Let the shadow go back on the dial 
beyond the age of Raphael ! Let us repair to the 
light-fountains of the morning world, when as yet 
there was some childlike faith and enthusiasm among 
men ! Thither went the earnest pilgrims only to 
find a desert, but a desert from which they could 
see, as never when near to it 3 the seed of all the 
faded arts of Greece and Italy thickly strewn in 
Co vent Garden and Maiden Lane, — their first grass- 
blade prophecies appearing in the glories which 
Turner had thrown on the walls of English homes. 

Happy for the wild prophet, for the eye-dazzled 
school he founded, and for us — the people — that the 
Interpreter arose whose words we have already 
read ; who, always eloquently, albeit sometimes fit- 
fully, has managed to utter to this English race the 
great admonition, that no Art can ever spring up 
here unless it spring from the hearts and homes of 
the people ; that never until the homes of the poor 
are happy can the mansions of the rich be beautiful ; 
and — this above all — that any true Art must be the 
fair expression of the faith that is, not of creeds that 
have had their day and their flower in Greece and 
Italy. 

Heine stood with his friend Alphonso before 
the cathedral at Eheims. C( Why," said Alphonso, 
(e cannot such structures be built now ? " " That," 
replied the poet, sc was built by an age of convic- 
tions ; ours is an age of opinions." 



THE REJECTED STONE. 335 

How little does the copyist in the Venetian, or 
Florentine, or English Gallery understand the prac- 
tical need which created the work he imitates ! He 
would repeat, for applause of dilettanti, a picture 
which was wrought to save the unlettered poor 
from hell, and allure them heavenward ; he would 
make a prettiness of saints and demons who on the 
old canvas waged a war with eternal issues for the 
soul of the peasant, who thus only could realise the 
mighty drama of heaven and earth. The domes are 
copied when the shrines for which they were built 
have perished ; and the spire in which the roof of 
the cottage was transfigured, pointing the peasantry 
from afar to their common religious dwelling, re- 
mains only to show the poor the particular spot with 
which they have nothing at all to do. For some 
time yet these things may call themselves Art. The 
graceful serpent having glided away elsewhere, we 
must stuff this its cast skin as well as we can, and 
persuade ourselves that its faded spots are the stars 
of heaven. Meanwhile the living line of grace and 
beauty in its seeming death is already putting forth 
for eyes subtle as its own the jewels that shall 
adorn its new sheath. 

What convictions have we corresponding to those 
which sculptured the Phydian Jove or the Milonian 
Venus, or painted the great Italian pictures, or 
built St. Peter's dome? None. Then for the 
present no real Art. The one thing we really 



336 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



believe in is Scepticism : this is the inspiration of 
our Science, of our clamour for more education, of 
our democracy ; they are all the utterances of the 
clear and vigorous Misgiving which distinguishes 
this age. But in these directions alone can we find 
the tendencies which, shadows as they are, point 
toward the faint gray that must flush to the dawn 
of Art. Our very Scepticism having sent us into 
Town-halls and Corn-exchanges in England, and into 
Free Schools, Universities, and State-houses in 
Germany and America, these begin to gather a cer- 
tain elegance about them. The American School- 
house rises in the smallest village like a castle. The 
Birmingham Town-hall has more poetry about it 
than any of the Churches around it. The Hoe 
cylinder press has a touch of transcendentalism in 
its gentle power. The gas-fixtures are putting 
forth pendent lilies. There are graceful forms visible 
at the cattle-shows. A tint of beauty shines upon 
all these green shoots, that mark each where some 
sinew of necessity has given its stroke of work in 
good faith. 

Poor things are these. Be it admitted. But 
whence came those splendours of ancient art we 
copy and recopy ? Those illuminated letters of old 
manuscripts were but the shapes of hut or tree or 
animal footprint with which the savage marked for 
his fellow the fact he would convey. The blending 
tree-branches, the trefoil flower, swell to the Gothic 



THE REJECTED STONE. 



337 



pile ; and the sunrise is photographed on the flam- 
boyant wall. The cornice was the rude Northman's 
shield against the snow ; the fringe on the tower 
was made for cross-bows. The simple devices of 
necessity in one age become the ideals of another. 
The serious occupations of their ancestors become 
the sports of the luxurious. The primitive trade- 
marks become heraldic arms. There is not a beauty 
shed upon us by the fading Arts of the past which 
was not born of some effort of man to adjust his life 
to the emergency before him, just as the Covent 
Garden greengrocer worked a hundred years ago, 
as now, all unconscious that one sane mind at least 
would find his incidental "litter" fit to grace the 
summit of St. Gothard. 

Yet I would not say that the Arts of the past 
have accomplished their work. Locked up, here 
at least, from the people, — especially on the one day 
when they might see them, — they have not yet done 
the only work they can do ; they have not stimulated 
the horny lens in the labourer's brow into an eye. 
There is beauty enough all around us, had we eyes 
to see it. " Mr. Turner," said a sagacious lady, 6i I 
never saw anything in Nature like your picture 
there." "Don't you wish you could?" answered 
the artist. The artist is he who sees a thing ; the 
rest of us see but a little surface of any object. 
When the people have eyes, Apollos and Madonnas 
will walk the streets before them. Can any art 

Y 



338 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE, 



equal, 0 mother, the shining hair and blue eyes of 
thy child ? One day, an eye like that which looks 
from the parent to the babe will be taught to scan 
the vast cartoons of Eternal Beauty covering earth 
and sky, and not only the one darling lineament of 
it revealed by love. 

Who built the grandeurs of Baalbec? The 
conviction that induced three hundred of the Car- 
thaginian youth to lie victims upon its altar for the 
good of their city. Baal, Jupiter, Jahve, — the Sun 
in his manifold apotheoses, — they have had their 
kingdoms, their sacrifices ; but Humanity has its 
temples and altars yet to come. Already the flower 
of the American youth has shown itself ready to die 
for the most despised of races ; and over their graves 
shall ascend the conviction that to create man him- 
self to rescue him from degradation and unfold his 
powers, is the high task of the coming Art. In its 
light, the finer souls shall look upon the meanest 
abode where a human Spirit dwells with a reverence 
equal to that which ancient Syrians felt for the temple 
of the Sun ; and what was once done for saints and 
gods shall be done for men and women. So wrought 
the original Creators of Art. A beggar sat for one 
of the apostles in the Vatican, a barefooted flower- 
girl for one of its angels. But I dream of a yet 
higher Art, which shall make the beggar an apostle 
of God — not in paint, but in reality; which shall 
transform the flower-girl to an angel in deed and in 



THE REJECTED STONE. 



339 



truth; under whose touch dead hearts and strong 
brains shall come forth, like rock from the quarry, 
to rise in the walls and domes of a humanised 
world. Of the creations of that future Art, the 
greatest sculptures and pictures of the past are but 
sketches and studies ; its destiny shall be to realise 
those patterns " seen on the Mount" in purified 
towns, happy homes, clean and sweet tenements, 
universal education, beautiful health, and, above all, 
in securing to every human being the freedom to 
carve his or her own being into the character for 
which each life exists, — the statue worthy to be 
unveiled in the presence of God and man. 




XXVIII. 



PIXY-LED. 



No one can foresee the quantity of light which will he generated 
hy letting the People he in communication with men of genius. 
This comhination of hearts will he the Voltaic Pile of Civilisation. 
We know of nothing too lofty for the people. . . . The multitude — 
and in this lies their grandeur — are profoundly open to the ideal. . . . 
The more divine the light, the more is it made for the simple soul. 

Victor Hugo. 

It seems His newer will 
We should not think at all of Him, hut turn, 
And of the world that He has given us make 
What hest we can. 

Clotjgh. 



PIXY-LED. 




ANDEEINGr in Wales I found a rustic who 
believed in pixies, and I deciphered from 
his dialect his notions concerning them. 
There were not many of them nowadays, he said, 
with evident satisfaction, and especially few in the 
neighbourhood of the railways ; but still they could 
be occasionally heard in the woods and under the 
earth, and every now and then a traveller was misled 
by them. How was he misled ? Why, he seemed 
to see his own house-gate just before him, but when 
he came near it, it was somewhere else; or there might 
be something to attract him which always glided 
somewhere else, and really was nothing at all ; and 
so he wandered far from his way. (Here was the 
Hindu Yoganidra, or Illusion, holding her own 
within sight of the Atlantic !) To my further ques- 
tioning he replied that the pixy-spell had to yield 
to either of two antidotes ; if the victim turned any 
garment he had on inside out he recovered his wits, 
or else when the next Sabbath dawned he would be 



344 EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



released from the delusion. On hearing this grave 
account I at first experienced a certain delight at 
getting so near to the ancient religion of our ances- 
tors ; but the next moment the antiquary in me 
was shamed : I remembered that I was a pilgrim 
toward the shrine of a human religion, and bethought 
me with thankfulness that the pixies had almost 
vanished, and that only one here or there could now 
be found who believed in their existence. Happy 
are we that live in an age and land of light and 
knowledge, I said, whom Science has taught to look 
upon the fern or the toadstool as an organism of 
wisdom, and not as the hiding-place of an elf that 
waylays and misleads us ! 

But when I wandered through the cities of Eng- 
land and Scotland, and saw the behaviour of the people 
on the first day of each week, the credulous Welsh- 
man did not seem so isolated as before. Surely the 
Sunday had laid a spell upon the people similar to 
that which it had been said by him to dissolve. For 
six days of the week we go about in our right senses; 
but on Sunday our populations lose their wits, and 
stray helplessly from their own Nineteenth Century 
homes to wander amid the delusions of antiquity. 
On Saturday the English people are among the 
most sensible people in the world ; on Sunday, the 
stupidest. 

The parallel between the pixy-led and the Sab- 
bath-led people is not so fanciful as it may at first 



PIXY-LED. 



345 



appear. Our Science of Mythology has proved the 
pixies to be the shrunken forms of the once power- 
ful gods of Northern religion, lingering, since 
Christianity outlawed them, in a size diminished 
for the requirements of the nursery, and lurking in 
the superstitions of districts unvisited by the school- 
master. But it is equally true that the sanctity of 
the Seventh Day is the survival of the old worship 
of Ashtaroth or Astarte, Queen of Heaven, — the 
Moon, that is, which renews itself in four quarters 
of seven days each. There is even a trace of the 
intelligence previously ascribed to the Sun and 
Moon in the Mosaic account of their creation — " the 
greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to 
rule the night;" and the belief hides in our word 
" lunacy," as well as in various rustic superstitions 
concerning the new moon. This new moon is con- 
tinually associated with the Sabbath in the Bible, 
and it is the consent of scholars that the festivals of 
the two originated together. The priests of Moses 
retained the sacred days and festivals of the older 
faith — festivals known to Assyrians, Arabs, Indians, 
and even Peruvians — but of course associated them 
with their own deities. At first the sanction of the 
Seventh Day observance was that Jahve had rested 
on that day after his toils of creation; but that seems 
to have been not sufficiently impressive, since in the 
second edition of the Decalogue the Sabbath is 
associated only with the deliverance of Israel from 



346 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Egypt. It became so powerful, that a man could be 
stoned to deatli for the slightest work done on that 
d a y? jet its sanctity must have to a great degree 
vanished at the time when Jesus experienced less 
inconvenience from his repeated violations of it than 
he now would in a Scottish village. Since his time 
the Seventh Day observance has lingered only among 
J ews and a few barbarous tribes. 

As Moses adopted the festivals of the Moon, the 
Christians, after the death of Jesus, adopted the 
festivals of the Sun. As Moses associated the Sab- 
bath with Jahve, the Christians connected the 
Sun's Day with Jesus. There is no reminiscence 
of Jahve's rest, but a curious mingling of Mosaism, 
Sun-worship, and Christianity, in the first explana- 
tion we have of the observance of the Sun-day by 
Christians. It is that of Justin Martyr (a.d. 147): 
" We all of us assemble together on the day of the 
Sun, because it is the first day, in which Grod 
changed darkness and matter, and made the world. 
On the same day also Jesus Christ our Saviour rose 
from the dead." 

The Sabbath was as gloomy as the night over 
which the deity to whom it referred ruled, and the 
Day of the Sun was joyous. So it remains on the 
Continent of Europe to this day. But the reaction 
against Roman Catholic usages which followed the 
Reformation, the existence of the command about 
the Sabbath in the Decalogue, and a certain dismal 



PIXY-LED. 



347 



element in the Anglo-Saxon man, combined to lead 
on the revival of Judaism known as Puritanism, and 
with it the blending of the Sunday with the Sab- 
bath, notwithstanding the furious protests of Luther, 
Calvin, and the other Reformers. " If anywhere," 
cried Luther, " the day is made holy for the mere 
day's sake, — if anywhere anyone sets up its ob- 
servance upon a Jewish foundation, — then I order 
you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to 
feast on it, to do anything that shall reprove this 
encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty." 

The Sabbath and the Sunday are as much rem- 
nants of old mythologies as the pixies. But they 
have not diminished in size like the pixies. It is 
indeed marvellous that the old Moon-deity is still 
strong enough in Great Britain to receive human 
sacrifices. Here are Baal (the Sun) and Ashtaroth 
(the Moon), with their idolaters in full power, and 
human health, happiness, and improvement bound 
as victims on their altars ! Our Sabbatarians do 
not, like the Nestorian Christians, honestly fulfil 
the Jewish law, and kill the man who travels or 
works on Sunday ; but they confine the people in 
their dens of filth or the gin-shop, and deprive them 
of the noble opportunities of their one free day. 
And, to complete the irony of the case, we send 
missionaries to the poor wretches who cast them- 
selves under the Car of Juggernaut ! The Car of 
Juggernaut may be as bad as a Scotch Sabbath, — 



348 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



I have never seen it, — but it is hard to pass on Sun- 
day by the reeking closes of Edinburgh, where the 
poor are barred in by superstition, and, from fields 
where the birds are singing; and the sun shining, to 
look down upon the spires of that city, without 
seeing each shape itself to a horrid idol, with 
humanity wasting, as by a slow fire, before it. 

We are, indeed, not so bad as that in England ; 
nevertheless, the main body of the Sunday is here in 
the power of the idol, especially so far as the poor 
are concerned. The rich can go to the Zoological 
Gardens on Sunday. They can have their open 
libraries, pictures, music, and games at home. The 
clergy, disregarding — they, their servants, and their 
sextons — so much of the Commandment as does not 
suit them, find their pleasure on that day, well 
knowing that, under the law ee Whosoever doeth 
work therein shall be put to death," every one of 
them would have been stoned to death by the con- 
gregation of Israel. But although the law of Eng- 
land is so much more merciful than the law of 
England's God that men cannot be stoned to death, 
the Poor Man's Sunday is still a disgrace to our 
civilisation. 

The Sunday question is a very large one. It 
concerns not only one-seventh of every human life, 
but the whole leisure time of labouring millions. 
To them destiny presents only so much release from 
drudgery and physical bondage. An ancient satirist 



PIXY- LED. 



349 



represents a carpenter with his log of wood hesi- 
tating whether he shall make it into a god or a 
stool. England places every working man before 
his Sunday, and compels him to shape it to a Sab- 
batarian idol or a Satyr of the public-house. But 
what might not be made of this beautiful material ! 
On that day Art might cast its ray across the dismal 
lot of Toil ; the wonders of Science, the crystals of 
the Earth, the curiosities of History and Nature, 
the pictorial illustrations of human achievements, 
heroisms, and the celebrations of grand epochs, 
might kindle, refine, and ennoble those who now 
live and die as in caverns ; they might count their 
higher, their real lives by luminous Sundays, 
remembering; each as having brought them some 
new thought or uplifting ideal ; they might sing, 
with George Herbert, 

The Sundays of man's life, 

Threaded together on Time's string, 

Make "bracelets to adorn the wife 
Of the Eternal Glorious King ! 

But the pixy-spell is upon us, and it can be 
removed only by a complete change of our religious 
raiment inside out. To make that day what it 
should be involves a revolution in the fundamental 
ideas of religion. It would imply a belief in a deity 
detached from a book ; in a living, and not a dead, 
deity ; in a deity to whom every day belongs ; in a 
deity not dependent for his happiness or equanimity 



35° 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



upon human abasement before him. That every day 
is the Lord's Day, and that every human interest 
religiously sacrificed is offered to an idol, as much 
as if it were roasted meat offered to his palate or 
incense to his nostrils, is a transcendent faith to 
whose height we shall not so easily climb. The 
Sunday will follow the development of human faith: 
it has reflected the mystery of the changing Moon, 
it has invested the greatness of the Giant Mechanic 
who built the universe in six days, it has been 
abased before the power that swallowed up Pharaoh 
and his hosts, it has shone with the gladness of 
Apollo risiag with his radiant chariot, it has followed 
the glooms and the glories of religion in its oscilla- 
tions between fear and hope, heaven and hell ; and 
when the religion of Humanity shall arrive, it will 
faithfully reflect the happiness and welfare of Man. 

And because so much is implied in it, there 
is no cause that demands more the faithful service 
of the thinker and the philanthropist than that 
which demands the opening of museums, art-galleries, 
lecture-rooms, and concerts on the Sunday. That 
is a fatal servility that leads liberal believers to 
defer to the prejudices of neighbours and servants, 
and suspend games and pleasures on Sunday. Our 
neighbours and servants require our testimony 
against those chains which our timidity helps to 
strengthen. We have no right to set up in our 
homes, side by side, the God of Truth and our 



PIXY-LED. 



35 



neighbour's idol. Our thought and our deed should 
be one. If a thing be false, let no true man or 
woman bend before it. If it be true, let it be 
organised in our homes and in our lives. It is but 
little, O my brothers, that we can do to lighten 
the superstitions that degrade and afflict mankind, 
— little enough at best ; all the more should it be 
our very best ! 



XXIX. 



Minerva. I have settled in this place these mighty deities, 
hard to be appeased ; they have obtained by lot to administer all 
things regarding men. But he who has not found them gentle 
knows not whence come the ills of life. 

JEschyltjs {JErinnys). 

She saw 
Through every world. 

* * * 

Thrice she was burnt, 
Thrice she was born, 
Oft, not seldom, 
And yet she lives. 

The Voltjspa. 



OUR EUMENIDES. 




NE of them I saw driving, with snaky lash, 
a vast herd of miserable men, women, and 
children. She drove them by the palace- 
gates, past the splendid clubs, through noble parks. 
On her forehead was written Pauperism. The 
wretched ones passed by the Ministers of State 
driving in their carriages to Parliament, and, hold- 
ing out their wasted arms, cried, " Help us to reach 
some land where we can find work and bread !" 
The Ministers said, " Be ye fed," and passed on. 
I followed, and saw many fall by the way and 
perish, and to all of these were distributed tracts 
(i On the Goodness of God." As the human herd 
was driven on it became vaster, and others of 
the Eumenides came to help drive them ; the name 
of one was Crime, of another Disease, of yet 
another Drunkenness. These drove them until 
they were lost in gin-shops, in hospitals, in work- 
houses, in fens and dens. 

And I saw that when their work for the moment 



356 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



was done, ere repairing to find other wretched ones 
to pursue, the Eumenides were like each other : they 
were sisters ; and all the daughters of Ignorance. 

Why have not the poor work to do ? While 
civilisation has multiplied the employments of in- 
telligence and skill, it has diminished those of 
ignorance. We have educated iron and wood, fire 
and vapour, to do the work of the ignorant; but 
we have not educated men and women to do work 
on the higher plane where labour is more than ever 
demanded. Left in ignorance, the paupers are also 
without the restraints of culture and foresight, and 
their increase is like the spawning of the low animal 
orders. Nay, there would seem to be a fearful 
tendency in pauperism to stimulate sexual passions. 
In France the carp for breeding are kept from much 
food, and are called peignards. Thus ignorance 
begins the sad work which over-population com- 
pletes. 

And yet for all these hands there are waste 
places of the earth calling. Who can bring together 
the idle power and the idle land? Not a squire- 
archy desiring an ever-glutted labour-market ; not 
a government which instinctively suspects any 
proposal that has the misfortune to be humane; — 
not these, though they saw England transformed to 
one vast city, with its woods, parks, open spaces — its 
very lungs — in atrophy ! Not a Church which 
teaches the poor that this earth was meant to be the 



OUR EUMENIDES. 



357 



howling wilderness it is, and that their concern 
must be to avoid future, and not present, hells ! 
Not the silly Samaritans whose cruel charities 
tempt the beggar to remain on the street, and who, 
in their pietistic care for the hypocrites who call 
themselves " the worthy poor," neglect those saddest 
victims of all, the devil's poor! Not the " Charities," 
with their endowments running through antiquated 
channels away from those they were meant to aid ! 

And yet there is no man or woman we meet in 
the street who would not turn aside and give his or 
her last shilling to save a fellow-creature from 
starving, if on that shilling it were certain life or 
death depended. With such resources of com- 
passion all around them, the poor are starving ; and 
for each one that actually starves, how many draw 
near to it ! nay, how many whose death is ascribed 
to specific disease could have conquered that disease 
with sufficient nourishment, warmth, and care ! 

Is Crime not also the daughter of Ignorance ? 
The crime against property is the grasp of the 
blindfolded after happiness. Those who really see 
the necessary inviolable conditions through which 
objects can be alone truly reached will not attempt 
the impossible plan. The preventing grace of 
Common Sense is enough to restrain men from 
putting ice under the pot they would have boil. 
Crimes of brutality and passion are but the natural 
effects of having wild animals running at large in 



35* 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



society. When the tiger is four-footed, and the 
serpent in the dust, we understand them and provide 
cages; but when they come two-footed, in human 
guise, we raise no bar to their freedom. The 
gallows is a poor hole in the top of our kettle to 
escape the dangers of a force which, trained and 
mastered, would draw the freights of civilisation. 
The prison is our miserable apology for being less 
able to harness man-power than horse-power for 
beneficent ends. Saadi met a stranger seated on 
a tiger which bore him quietly ; to him, paralysed 
with fear, the stranger said, " 0 Saadi, withdraw not 
thy neck from the yoke of God, and nothing shall be 
able to withdraw its neck from thy yoke." Every 
animal in field or jungle represents a special 
faculty ; each has climbed into the heart and 
brain of man, that it may be our lowly saviour 
from some weakness or evil ; Fatima has only to 
offer her hand, and her beast becomes a prince ! 

Disease is the very physiognomy of Ignorance. 
The mass of mankind are conceived in ignorance, 
and trained without knowledge. Did all the mal- 
formations of mind and heart inherited or fostered 
by the ignorant motherhood of the world appear in 
physical traits, the majority of people would be 
humped and crippled ; as it is, to the ignorance of 
parents, to the stupidity of those who, as was once 
eaid, perpetually (i throw drugs of which they know 
little into a body of which they know less," and to 



OUR EUMENIDES. 



359 



the general unreason which still does not recog- 
nise that every centre of disease sends out a ghoul 
to prey upon the whole body of Society, it is to 
be attributed that not only mankind, but their 
Theology and Politics, are in a condition of normal 
invalidism. Calvin's liver-troubles became organised 
into a body of divinity, Swedenborg's lunacy into 
Swedenborgianism ; the Church Litany was the 
outcry of a people stricken by plague, pestilence, 
and famine. The clergyman's sore throat afflicts 
also his sermon. My Lords' gout tells in their 
legislation ; and it is impossible not to perceive that 
the Irish Land Bill, the Education Bill, and other 
schemes are suffering from parliamentary late hours. 

What shall we say of the direst Fury of all — 
Drunkenness ? It is heart-breaking to see the 
amount of earnestness, love, humanity, wasted (or 
nearly so) in the effort to rescue men from that 
evil. To men who have been created by stimu- 
lants, and whose every sense exists by its stimulant, 
the prohibitionists come with denunciation of stimu- 
lants. They would suppress public-houses in a 
world where in every growth — rice, sugar-cane, 
cocoa-nut, vine, palm, sycamore, walnut, banana, 
honey, every fruit — nay, the very grass ! — Nature 
proffers the stimulating cup to human lips. 
Because of the sore-eyed, give up light ! it cries. 
Avoid the basin, since thousands have been drowned 
in water ! Have the weaknesses of reformed 



360 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



inebriates reappeared in this intemperate Tem- 
perance ? " If a man strive for masteries, yet is 
he not crowned except he strive lawfully." The 
Russian Skopsi have a short method against -sexual 
vice. We can put an end to the picking of pockets 
by a general amputation of hands. But a stream is 
not destroyed by foreclosing a particular channel. 

To a great extent drunkenness has been mas- 
tered in the higher classes of society. Let any one 
compare the customs of respectable people in old 
times with those now prevailing. The ladies still 
leave the gentlemen at the table after dinner, but 
not now because those gentlemen are in a con- 
dition unfitting them for the society of ladies. 
Afternoon or evening marriages are still illegal, but 
not now because men of property are not supposed 
to know what they are about toward the close of 
the day. The old competition as to the number 
of bottles that can be poured into one human skin is 
past, and the gentleman is no longer normally to be 
looked for under the table. But what has produced 
this change ? We commonly say, " civilisation," 
(( general enlightenment," and so on : but these 
mean only that life has gained new resources ; that 
art, science, literature, travel, intellectual occupa- 
tions, have become rivals of the bottle ; that there 
are many stimulants where all were once concen- 
trated in one or two. Life to the educated becomes 
too rich in pleasures to be thrown away. The man 



OUR EUMENIDES. 



361 



who, amid the various resources now opened up, 
ruins himself or his fortunes by drink, is regarded 
as a fool. ' 

But how is it with the impoverished and the 
ignorant? They are still under the doom of 
drudgery. The glass of gin still furnishes their 
only available paradise of forgetfulness. Their 
inward resources are unopened. Life is not so 
precious, passed in a den of filth, or on the tread- 
mill of toil, that they should care much for its ruin. 
The drunken classes are the classes without hope. 
Now and then the man of genius is found ruining 
himself by indulgence in drink, but — except in cer- 
tain hereditary cases — disappointment, inability to 
meet his ideal, have brought him to it; for there 
is a pauperism of soul as well as of body. 

For the victims that have accumulated among 
us there should be inebriate asylums. The mad- 
dening adulterations should be surely curbed. 
The cheap wines, light fruit -waters, and pure 
beers, which secure soberness on the Continent of 
Europe, may easily be introduced into England, and 
they will be when a Chancellor of the Exchequer 
comes who can estimate the costliness of the 
revenue he obtains by taxing them. But the 
root of drunkenness will not be touched until the 
new resources of life which have sobered the 
educated and comfortable shall be within reach of 
the poor. 



362 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Thus we find that the Furies are sisters ; when 



know all of them. Where we have classes holding 
privileges and interests apart from the common 
welfare of mankind; mothers and wives trained to 
be social toys, rather than wise companions of 
men and instructors of children ; Churches preach- 
ing the natural corruption of new-born babes, and 
the superior importance of some other world than 
this, — there shall we find the essential evil, that 
may fly from heart to head, from spirit to flesh, 
but will never be healed but by a general reform 
of the whole constitution of things. 

Any reform which does not deal radically with 
human ignorance is as the sweeping away of this 
or that snow-drift while winter is yet in the sky 
and the snow still falling. 

To us also, as to the wise Greeks, the Furies 
will be known as the Eumenides — "the well- 
meaning" — if they scourge us to the angels of 
which they are shadows. 



we know the cause and bearing of one evil, we 




XXX. 



< GODLESS SCHOOLS." 



That which makes our view of the present state of the world a 
source of perplexity and horror is the consideration that every human 
heart bears in itself a type, more or less distinct, of those powers 
and that happiness which have been the portion of the most exalted 
minds. There is perhaps no spot on earth, however dreary, in 
which the germs of many plants, and the larvae of shining and light- 
winged insects, are not hidden, though for thousands of years 
undeveloped, and still expecting the warm breeze that shall call 
them out in life and beauty. 

Sterling. 

They stole the only wealth I had, — 

Though poor and old, the sun, at least, was mine, 

Beraxger. 



"GODLESS SCHOOLS." 



llf 



NE morning, on the invitation of an Evan- 
gelical friend, I accompanied a deputation 
from the A.L.W.L. to the President of 
the Board of Trade. These mystic letters repre- 
sent the Association for the Leavening of the Whole 
Lump. The Minister received us courteously, 
and, the interview having been opened with a 
prayer by the chaplain of the Association, the 
Chairman proceeded to explain the objects they 
had in view. The Society had been formed, he 
said, by a number of persons who had observed 
with sorrow the immoralities and infidelities of the 
world, and had come to the conclusion that they were 
due to the sad divorce that existed between the 
occupations of mankind and the Word of God. In 
the progress of society, men had been drawn to 
obtain many of their physical needs from common 
sources — but, alas, these sources were generally 
secular. We had godless bakeries, godless boot- 
shops, and godless groceries. Was it any wonder 



366 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



that men who were thus, from the crown of their 
head to the soles of their feet, made up of un- 
sanctified substances should be reprobates? The 
apostle had warned us that, whether we eat or drink, 
we should do so to the glory of God; yet how 
could this be the case so long as our workshops and 
markets are in their present unblest condition ? 

The chairman was followed by a baker, who 
said that nothing would be easier than to identify 
the bread of the body with the bread of life. He 
hoped to see the time when no loaf could be legally 
purchased which had not on it a text of Scripture ; 
nay, was it too much to demand of the Parliament 
of a Protestant Christian People that on one side of 
every loaf should be stamped the words, " No 
Popery !" and on the other, for the good of Jews, 
ee Christ-murderers I"? At present, even infidels are 
licensed to establish bakeries, and it is doubtful 
whether prayers are said over half the barrels of 
flour from which the people get their daily bread. 
Were it not better that families should have no 
bread at all than that they should thus destroy 
their souls for the sake of a mere physical existence ? 

A bootmaker said that all that the preceding 
brother had said of godless bakeries might refer 
equally to the godless boot-shops by which society is 
shod. He had been long deeply interested in the 
soles of men, and was convinced that the reason 
why so many tread the Broad Way that leadeth to 



"GODLESS SCHOOLS." 



367 



Destruction is, that their feet are encased in godless 
leather, instead of being shod with the Preparation 
of the Gospel of Peace. For himself, he had long 
used in the making of boots and shoes tracts printed 
by the Tract Society ; but, such was the perversity 
of the human heart, his manufactures were even 
less popular than those of other shops. He thought 
the law might at least demand that only Protestant 
and orthodox Christians should be permitted to sell 
boots, and that the Lord's Prayer should be said 
over every customer before taking his measure. 

Others present protested successively against 
godless breweries, groceries, barber-shops, &c, and 
the scandal that we should be kept in order by a 
godless police was vehemently denounced. 

The Minister promised to give the weighty 
matter which the deputation had at heart his very 
best consideration, and bowed us to the door, to 
which the Dean our Chaplain advanced backwards, 
invoking the divine blessing upon the Board of 
Trade. 

Who this godly man was I did not learn at the 
time, but have since concluded that it was the Dean 
of Norwich; for very soon after I read in the 
papers that a meeting held to consider the subject 
of education had been startled by an opinion ex- 
pressed by that divine to the effect that, " though 
secular education may promote civilisation, civilisa- 
tion is not evangelisation nor christianisation." 



368 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Had the meeting been called to consider how the 
hovels of the poor might be cleansed, the same pro- 
found mind would no doubt have ventured the 
declaration that cleanliness is not godliness, and 
insisted that there should be no bathing but 
baptism. 

Or the chaplain may have been the clergyman 
whom I heard append to the maxim that parents 
have no more right to starve their children's minds 
than to starve their bodies, the declaration that they 
had just as little right to starve their children's 
souls as to starve their minds or bodies, — in sublime 
oblivion of the fact that, while we agree about the 
nature of bread, and the nature of reading and 
writing, what one thinks food for the soul another 
believes to be poison. 

The English people have compared the statistics 
of every crime with the statistics of ignorance, and 
have been brought face to face with the fact that 
the training of children in ignorance is really the 
crippling of their energies, the corruption of their 
morals; and that, in the presence of facts that 
amount to national disgrace, right and duty compel 
the State to see that every child is educated. The 
children being those of Catholics, Jews, Rationalists, 
and Protestant Christians, it follows plainly that 
compulsory schools which they are all taxed to sup- 
port cannot in justice teach what either regards 
as harmful. England has not the right to compel 



" GODLESS SCHOOLS." 



3 6 9 



the Catholic child to listen to the reading of the 
Protestant Bible, nor the Jewish child to learn 
of the New Testament; nor to insist that the 
child of the Rationalist shall be taught that Balaam's 
ass spoke. It may be done, but it is unjust ; and 
the scheme incorporating it must suffer — as it is 
now suffering in America — the fate of all injustice. 
The alliance of the oppressed against a wrong, 
and the overthrow of that wrong, is only a question 
of time. 

This simple position is met by an outcry against 
"godless schools." But to some among us every 
school must be godless. The denominational schools 
of England are godless to all who do not believe in 
the god they have set up. Trinitarian, Unitarian, 
Calvinist, Jew, worship deities as different as 
Brahm, Allah, and Jesus. But they all agree that 
men should know how to read, write, count, and 
comprehend the principles of honesty, justice, ve- 
racity, and benevolence. The teaching of any 
special form of religion is technical, and one man 
has the same right to tax me to turn his son out an 
accomplished Positivist, that another has to tax me 
to make his son a Christian. 

The question is, can we by cooperation extend 
our means so as to secure to every child the educa- 
tion that each finds good for his own, whatever be the 
profession, trade, or religion to which he desires 
him to belong ? If we cannot separate the general 

A A 



37o 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



education which all require from the special reli- 
gious teaching which some desire, it only proves 
that such cooperation is impossible. But it is no 
solution to say that we must pay to have our neigh- 
bours' children taught what we are unwilling to 
have our own taught. It is to add meanness to 
injustice to invite us to be satisfied with keeping 
our children from school while the Bible is being 
read or the religion we believe false is taught ; as 
would be felt even by orthodox obtuseness if every 
Christian in England were taxed for the propaga- 
tion of Brahminism in India. A man can partly 
counteract an error taught his own child, but he is 
gravely asked to consent to aid in propagating what 
he holds to be falsehood beyond his power of 
control or remedy ! 

I do not wonder at the horror which the orthodox 
have of "godless schools." Their misgivings are 
quite natural. It may be safely assumed that, when 
human minds are reared under the simple rain and 
light of knowledge, the results will not be what they 
have been under the manipulations of priests. When 
the working man has learned to cast an eye of in- 
telligence into nature, it will be unlikely enough that 
he will find in sun or moon the god of Calvin, or in 
the blue sky or green earth suggestions of the lake 
of fire and brimstone. It has required a great deal 
of special instruction to lead mankind to believe the 
popular theology, and it is not without a certain 



"GODLESS schools: 



371 



satisfaction that the freethinker welcomes the ad- 
mission that minds may be trained to explore all 
actual knowledge without finding any basis for the 
Thirty-nine Articles or the Westminster Catechism. 
Nor need the freethinker conceal his consent that 
the fears of the orthodox are founded on truth. He 
knows that the cry for education, which is the arch 
of light spanning the cloud of misery, and vice 
around us, will not vanish before its promise is ful- 
filled. Its meaning is that Superstition is to be 
lifted from the hearts and minds of this people, and 
its end may be secured by the devious no les^ surely 
than by the direct path. It is not his cause that 
need fear the turning of Town Councils into reli- 
gious debating clubs, the struggle in every village 
over the religion to be taught in schools, the boring 
of children by Bible-readings and catechisms. It is 
the season that is in the sky which decides whether 
the falling rain shall turn to ice or flowers. The 
spirit and tendency of this age will determine the 
effect of the application of a permissive Act of Uni- 
formity to compulsory education. The secularist 
lecturer has his reasons for carrying the Bible in his 
pocket as well as the clergyman ; and his interpreta- 
tion of it will not suffer by its appearance as a badge 
of religious oppression. For the reading of the Scrip- 
tures of a particular religion, in schools supported 
by taxation of those who disbelieve that religion, 
can only be regarded as an oppression. It is not 



372 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



contended that there are not Bibles enough for all 
who desire them, and opportunities to have the same 
read to the children of those who look upon the 
English Bible as the Word of God. To bring it, 
therefore, into the common schools is to clothe the 
teacher so far with the functions of a priest, and to 
raise a sectarian flag, and with it all the jealousies 
and suspicions of opposing creeds, over the school 
which should be clear to all as their own home. And 
because a school does not do this, but bears to all 
the light they need, undiscoloured by the symbols 
which have caused the religious wars of history, to 
call it godless is to say a great deal for Atheism. 
If it be godless, so are the fountain and the sun- 
shine. 



■ XXXI. 

THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER. 



It -was revealed unto me : What other men trample on shall be 
thy food. 

George Fox. 



Action translates death into life, fable into verity, speculation 
into experience ; freeing man from the sorceries of tradition and the 
torpor of habit. The eternal Scripture is thus expurgated of the 
falsehoods interpolated into it by the supineness of the ages. 

Alcott. 



The question is not : Art thou 

In the nobility ? 
This is the question : Is there 

Xobility in thee ? 



Gleim, 



THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER. 



RESH from visiting the St. Pancras Arches 
— the Mars Hill of London, above whose 
altar to the Unknown God I had seen 
sitting Science, Poetry, Literature, and Art — I 
found my way into the Strangers' Gallery of the 
House of Commons. As I listened to the debate 
there were suddenly tc roars of laughter." In a 
moment of forgetfulness some statesman had alluded 
to the English people as " our own flesh and blood." 
Had he got hold of that skeleton of Tom Paine 
which infidels are said to be keeping somewhere, 
and dangled it before the club of wealthy gentle- 
men, he could not have been more scoffed. And 
why should not Parliament, as then constituted, 
laugh at the idea that the masses were of one flesh 
and blood with its honourable members? One 
cannot get in the woof what was not put into 
the web, nor of privilege and class interest obtain 
the recognition of Humanitv. 

The cachinnation passed out of Westminster 




376 



AN EARTH WARD PILGRIMAGE. 



Hall, and went sounding through the country. It 
came into collision with some sounds of quite a 
different kind, — with the voices, now plaintive, now 
jubilant, of sufferers soothed and healed in the 
asylums of charity ; with the appeals of Leagues 
against every form of wrong and degradation ; with 
the triumphant songs of millions liberated in 
America ; with the burden of ancient faith, which 
has come down over many laughing Parliaments, 
concerning man, " Thou hast made him a little 
lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with 
glory and honour!" All these contrary voices, 
with which the laughter came into hard collision, 
some of us could hear in the gallery, and we looked 
down with some anxiety on those below, who seemed 
not to hear them. There seemed, however, to be 
one ear keener than the rest among them, for an 
individual, amid much derision, uttered the following 
brief speech, which I must give from memory, as I 
have not been able to find it in any newspaper, nor 
in Hansard. He said : — 

(i Amid what revolutionary smoke and flame — 
mountain blazing to mountain — have been published 
the Rights of Man ! How dim must the parlia- 
mentary eye have become to which all the war-fires 
of English, histo have not furnished light enough 
by which to read on every man the charter of his 
rights ! Does a stomach imply food ; a hand, work ; 
lungs, air; exhaustion, rest; intellect, culture ; con 



THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER. 



377 



science,, moral freedom ; hope,, happiness ? Does 
he who, with a mind that might be improved, must 
pass through life with his talent buried in the earth, 
suffer no wrong ? Why is light given to a man 
whose way is hid ? Are hope, aspiration, capacity 
for delight, — found in every wretchedest man in 
London, as in the most fortunate, even as bone 
answers to bone in the two, — are these but ingenious 
schemes to add the torture of Tantalus to the 
routine of Ixion ? If a Devil be not at the head of 
this Universe, then man is marked all over with his 
rights ; and in manifold hideous vices, corruptions, 
sufferings, — in the nameless ghouls that batten on 
youth and beauty in our streets, — in false weights 
and measures, political dishonour, social coarseness 
and frivolity, — in the inability of the best men and 
women to be more than fragments of themselves, — 
in the chimpanzee chatter of churches and chapels, 
and the universal inoculation of Jesuitism, — Society 
is suffering the retributions of those who have denied 
the mass of men their divinely-certified rights. The 
most fearful hell Swedenborg found was perhaps 
that whose occupants fancied they were in heaven, 
and sang praises for their happiness. As I re- 
member, Swedenborg began seeing his visions 
in London, a region in which men may still be 
heard thanking God for J erusalems that are really 
Gehennas. But mark you, gentlemen, no Parlia- 
ment which has only shouts of derision for those 



378 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



who speak of the toiling people around us as o in- 
own flesh and blood — " 

Here the laughter burst out a^ain to such an 
extent that the speaker could not proceed. As he 
sat down a heavy blow, as from a tremendous mallet, 
was given to the door, which fell before it, and in 
there stalked a huge stern man with a hammer in 
his hand. 

As he glanced around on the assembly, the 
laughter sank to what sounded very much like a 
death-rattle. With a voice of thunder, the grim 
intruder spake as follows :— 

" There came a day when Odin, s the terrible 
and severe god, the Father of Slaughter, he who 
giveth victory and reviveth courage in the conflict, 
who nameth those that are to be slain,'— founder 
thus of the Age of Chivalry which shaped Europe, 
—became weary and dejected, and, resting on bis 
sword, which was also his sceptre, asked — i Cannot 
Love be as well as Hate, Life as well as Death ? ' 
Then he called Thor, his first-born son, and set a 
crown upon his head ; but when Thor asked for the 
sword, Odin gave into his hand in lieu thereof a 
hammer, saying, ' The Kingdom of the Destroyer 
is necessary, but brief; the Kingdom of the Builder 
shall never end.' Thenceforth in the centre of every 
globule of Northern blood sat enthroned the ideal — 
Man fulfilling his twofold destiny as labourer and 
god. 



THE GOD fVITH THE HAMMER. 



379 



" The Southern and Oriental formulas into 
which the Anglo-Saxon race has been coerced for a 
few centuries cannot destroy this throne. When 
the spasmodic effort to obtain things by genuflexion 
and lip-service, whereinto we have been galvanised, 
has passed away, and the worship which is work 
prevails, and it is known that Luck is the veritable 
Loki whose evil progeny Thor destroys, that all 
things are attainable through fulfilment of their in- 
tervening conditions, and only thus attainable, — then 
the god with the hammer, too real to care whether 
he be called carpenter's son or by other title, will 
have fulfilled the destiny assigned him by the All- 
Father. 

" For a long time the Wolf Fensir, the Serpent 
Midgard, prevail over Thor. The labourer knows 
no further than to cross himself, or whine psalm- 
tunes, and pay his Peter's pence. The man whose 
daily life is a grapple for life and death with the 
laws of Nature knows nothing of those laws, such 
knowledge being reserved for those who never come 
in any perilous contact with gravitation or explosive 
gases. The wheels of our progress are splashed 
with their blood. Opie, the artist, explained to a 
questioner concerning his wonderful colours, 4 1 
mix them with my brains.' Poor Paddy has re- 
versed the case, and mixes his brains with the 
materials. As we drive over our roads, our waggons 
rattle on his brains ; the train speeds on iron that 



380 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



has entered his soul ; and whenever any great work 
is undertaken — as the tunnelling of a mountain, or 
the building of a bridge or church — instead of the 
bulls and sheep the ancients used to sacrifice on 
similar occasions, we offer up a hecatomb of Irish- 
men. 

(i For these miserable ones, for whom the 
universe holds no relief but the cup of gin and the 
begetting; or conceiving children wretched as tliem- 
selves, what hope ? None, unless the capitalist can 
be made to feel that he is doling out pitiful and 
unjust wages, not to Sullivan or to Smith, but to 
Almighty God ; no hope, unless his eye can be 
quickened to see beyond the uncouth body and 
brutal brow a soul of quite infinite stature, a flower 
of God's heart, — by no means a weed, though drest 
for a while in weeds, — crowned with the light of an 
eternal destiny. No matter how long it has been 
sepulchred, even if until it stinketh, the Christ 
of this age has no higher work than to cry to that 
entombed Thought, 6 Come forth ! Unbind him 
hand and foot ; take away the napkin which shuts 
away from those dull eyes the everlasting stars of 
truth ! ' We do not say he should not roll your 
hogshead, we only demand that he shall not be nailed 
up body and soul in your hogshead. We only 
ask that you shall not take him, whose only crime 
is that he is ever coining his heart and brain for the 
capitalist, and set him in this world for ever at the 



THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER. 



3S 



Criminal's Pump, where, at any minute's cessation 
from drudgery, the water rises to the drowning- 
point. We demand that study shall be no longer 
made to him synonymous with starvation. 

" Does anyone believe the present relations 
between Capital and Labour can endure ? They 
will endure just as long as the labourer is imbruted, 
and does not know his own worth. 

" Think what Capital is. It is sinews and nerves 
in metallic forms ; it is accumulated head-aches and 
heart-aches of drudges, sempstresses, servants ; it is 
a catacomb of human bones. Your pound sterling 
represents so much labour — that is its only value. 

" Think what Labour is. It is the one thing 
valuable : without it your bread is field-dust ; your 
butter, grass. Take it away from your ship, and, lo ! 
you are a savage swimming on a log ; from your 
fine dwelling, and you must burrow like a mole for 
every stone in it. 

" So long as Labour holds in unconsciousness the 
keys of the gateways to all good, it will be cheated 
as were the Red Indians, who were easily enticed 
to sell states for glass beads. But the Titans will 
not slumber for ever. The poor-school, the penny 
press, have not been so unproductive as some sus- 
pect. That man should be a hammer without the 
added god can never be the perpetual fact of 
Society. Therefore the hammer strikes. 

" In the Laws of Menu it is written : f Justice, 



382 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



being destroyed, will destroy ; being preserved, will 
preserve : it must therefore never be violated.' The 
Hebrew prophet cried : i I will come near to you in 
judgment: I will be a swift witness against those 
that oppress the hireling in his wages.' Wages? 
A wage is a gauge or measurement of work done. 
It does not mean that he who sows, plants, picks, 
lifts, drives, polishes, spins, weaves, and thus trans- 
forms dust and dirt to beauty and commodity, shall 
have a thousandth part of what accrues to him who 
shelters these transactions, but never sees them until 
they shine in his purse or his mansion. And be- 
cause a false balance is an abomination to the Lord, 
and because, 6 when God loathes aught, men pre- 
sently come to loathe it too,' the present relation of 
Capital and Labour cannot stand. Nemesis has yet 
her wheel and rudder for sea and land, and trade is 
everywhere pursued by the Law that underpaid 
labour is the dearest ; as the poor iron-forger put it, 
where there is cinder in the pay, there is cinder in 
the iron. When we think we have been very clever, 
and saved much, our ship is going to pieces, our 
train is smashed on broken rails, we are eating, 
drinking, and thinking taint and disease. The 
labourers, going downward, not only drag us with 
them, but manage, by pauperism and other atrocities, 
to filch back the very money we move Heaven and 
Earth to save. The pauper stops the way. The 
criminal stands there steadily and painfully extract- 



THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER. 



383 



ing from the hide of us what the hand has refused. 
Nay, there is something mysteriously passing from 
our heart as well as from our hide. f Who is 
weak/ cried Paul, i and I am not weak ?' The 
Queen hears that three men have starved to death 
in one week, and writes to her Minister that she 
feels that thereby her reign has been sullied. 

" Mr. John Ruskin — the noble spirit of whose 
works on social questions will survive their inci- 
dental crudities, as Luther's heart survives his no- 
tions about consubstantiation and the devil — has 
recently advanced the opinion that the radical vice 
of all political economy is that it rests on the prin- 
ciple that the only true estimate of the value of 
labour is what that labour can be bought for. If 
the labour-market is over-full, then labour will be 
cheap, and vice versa. But Mr. Ruskin maintains 
that where a labourer is employed to do so much or 
so many hours' work, his just wage is what will 
exactly repair his expenditure of physical energy, 
and the number of cubic feet in sheltered space 
requisite for his healthy lodging. The question, he 
maintains, is really a chemical one, to be properly 
decided by a medical commission. 

" It is far easier to pronounce this absurd than 
to prove it so. It at least demands as much for a 
man as for a steam-engine, which will strike work 
for ever unless it be fed with precisely the amount 
of force it puts forth. But the fatal vice of the 



384 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



theory is, that no medical commission could measure 
the working man's expenditure on his work. The 
labourer is more than a working man ; he is also a 
man working. After his loss of physical energy 
has been restored, what chemistry is there that can 
measure or repair his loss in not being able to know 
his wife and child, to enjoy a home, to give one 
thought to the sacred Universe around him ? What 
medicinal art can distil for him the intellectual life 
absorbed from his hours by the sod, or recover for 
the brain its glories lavished upon the satisfaction of 
an animal's wants? First, indeed, man is a machine 
worked by so much heat ; but next he is a great 
spiritual hunger, which will take the fruit it craves 
from the Serpent if its God deny the same. 

ef But the day will come when thinking men 
will do honour to the man who proposed that the 
poor should be not only paid, but tf considered 
and who would fain have substituted for the mere 
buying and selling of human sinews and hearts a 
standard of value which should respect — albeit, on 
the mere physical plane — the individual need of 
each man. Here, at least, is a strain of the old 
Love that hears the young ravens when they cry. 

" When the hammer of Thor was held by the 
giant Thrym, and buried eight miles beneath the 
gelid rocks of Jotunheim, it was only through 
Freyja, Goddess of Love, that it could be regained. 
The fable grew out of our race, and we live to 



THE GOD WITH THE HAMMER. 385 

make it history. It is by the working of a Mighty 
Love — a Love that cannot find repose amid the 
declined tasks of humanity even by bestowing seven 
millions of pounds annually in charity — that Labour 
is to be recovered from the icy oppressions of Self- 
ishness, unearthed from hard necessities, and made 
the beautiful service of a divinity." 

When the man with the hammer had finished, 
he took his seat in the House without resistance ; 
for the laughter of Parliament over the flesh-and- 
blood ioke had indeed ended in a death-rattle. 




li u 



XXXII. 

THE PILGRIM'S LAST 
REFLECTIONS. 



The Nurakh sages ask, What use is there for a prophet in this 
world ? A prophet is necessary because men are connected with each 
other in the affairs of life : therefore rules and laws are indispensable, 
that all may act in concert, that there may be no injustice in giving 
or taking or partnership, but that the order of the world may 
endure. And it is necessary that these rules should proceed from 
God, that all men may obey them. 

The Persian Desatir. 

All made in the likeness of the One, 

All children of one ransom, 

In whatever hour, in whatever part of the earth, 

"We draw this vital air, 

We are brothers ; we must be bound by one compact : 
Accursed he who infringes it, 
Who raises himself upon the weak who weep, 
Who saddens an immortal spirit. 

Manzoni. 



THE PILGRIM'S LAST 
REFLECTIONS. 




FTER all, one of those gentlemen so recently 
employed by the upper classes to laugh 
down the rights of man in Parliament 
might not be without something to sav for himself. 
" You have the majority, it is true," he might say ; 
" so had Herod and Pilate when they joined hands. 
But I know that one with Truth is a more real 
majority. The rights of man ? Read the statistics 
of false measures, the statistics of gin and beer ; 
walk through St. Giles's with your pockets shut 
tight and your eyes wide open; visit the police 
court; watch the crowd gathered about the prize- 
ring ; and tell me what you think of their sacredness. 
How wonld you like such people to make laws for 
you ? Linger a little under the arches at St. Pancras, 
and listen to the religious ranters ; then put it to 
the vote of the assembly what shall be your creed.'' 
Lately I read the legend of a youth caught up 
in the air by an angel, with whom he floated over 
the world, that he might see the whole of it. The 



39° 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



angel went too near the stars for him. " Let us go 
lower," said the youth; i( I love the earth." The 
angel went lower — near enough for him to see the 
outlines of continents. " Lower yet ! " said the 
youth ; " I love the smell of the earth, its scented 
trees and grass ; and the bright ships, the fishermen, 
are dearer to me than hemispheres and continents." 
So the angel went lower still. But now they saw 
sad scenes : a poor slave and his wife pursued by 
blood-hounds ; they saw them plunge in the river, 
hand in hand, to find freedom in death. They saw 
an army besieging a city ; shot and shell bore death 
among women kneeling with babes in their arms. 
The city falls ; the survivors are given over to the 
cruelty and lust of the victorious soldiery. They 
saw the dens of cities where the human image is 
seared out of men and women by vice. And now 
the young man's wings began to droop. " Higher, 
higher !" he cried to the angel. " I have seen 
enough — too much ; let us soar higher ! " " Nay, 
not so," replied the angel ; " thou hast seen, not too 
much, but too little ; we must go lower." Then, 
lowering their wings, they skimmed the earth like 
swallows, and they saw men and women coming 
from far and near to break every fetter of the 
slaves whose cry they had heard; they saw hover- 
ing near the pillaged city a host with white banners 
binding up the wounded, warring upon war; and 
amid the dens of vice they saw busy workers building 



THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 



39 1 



schools, asylums, hospitals; nay, even amid the 
wretched and vile they found many heroically 
vanquishing the dangers and temptations of their 
hard lot, and, coming closer still, saw tints of kind- 
liness and feeling in tainted hearts, — in all, the hope 
and prophecy of a fairer destiny. 

May it not be that our philosophers and politi- 
cians also too generally come but close enough to 
see the outlines of nations, or the aggregates of 
populations ? 




FINE lady once refused to purchase a 
picture she had ordered of the French 
painter Millet, because by the side of a 
gardener in it, pruning his vines, there was a basket 
of manure. She saw not that it was a basket of 
lilies, nay, a basket of roses for the cheeks of the 
gardener's children in the cottage hard by. Lord 
Palmerston did not say many things one cares to 
remember ; but he did once remind us that " dirt 
is but matter out of its place." 

The philosophical opponents of democracy are 
not apt in these days to undervalue men because 
they are lowly. Their fault is that they cannot 
see in crime energy (( out of place," nor lilies in 
the dung of animalism. So far as the honest and 
ignorant workers are concerned, they say — u But 
the whole power and value of this ploughman is that 



39 2 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



he shall stick to his plough. The democrats would 
carry him to the hustings, where he is instantly 
transformed to a clod." But the democrat disclaims 
that his movement is theoretical. Democracy is the 
withdrawal of authority from those whose use of it 
is shown to be worse than anarchy. " Mud-turtles 
we, the people, may be ; but science has shown us 
how close is the creeping reptile to the soaring bird, 
and there is enough of the wing-principle in us to 
enable us to detect a fish pretending to be an eagle 
or a ploughman trying to be a peer. We shall 
follow with devotion true leaders when they come : 
our democracy means that we discharge the pre- 
tenders who stand in the way of real and authentic 
representatives and rulers. We fearlessly lay the 
axe to the root of the tree that cumbers the ground, 
with full faith in the vitality of the earth, and the 
human seed, and the unfailing seasons, which know 
when leaves must rot to feed the germs of future 
growths." 



EMOCEACY in America has shown 
itself to have been the effort of Society 
to pass from an arbitrary to a natural 
classification. No sooner has the last vestige of 
the unreal aristocracy disappeared with the slave- 
holding class, than Radicalism starts forward with 
the demand for an educational qualification in the 



THE PILGRIM'S LASL REFLECTIONS. 



393 



suffrage. To demand that every voter shall be 
able to read is little, but when readers alone are 
electors the standard must ascend* 



AN any good thing come out of Nazareth ? 
The carpenter's son comes to make our 
old mud-ball blossom with divine glory ; 
Homer passes, singing ballads for bread, and un- 
consciously opening the fountains of a river that 
shall refresh every intellectual growth of Europe ; 
Mohammed writes on palm-leaves and the shoulder- 
blades of sheep the sacred chants on which nine 
thousand millions of souls shall float heavenward ; 
Luther comes from forging iron to melt Europe in 
his heart-furnace and pass it into a new mould ; 
Shakespeare comes from a farmhouse on the by- 
way and creates a new literature ; Burns follows 
the plough till its share reaches to the heart of 
humanity, and imperishable harvests of thought and 
beauty mark where he has trod ; — yet still the world 
lifts its eyes beyond the insignificant Nazareths, 
and looks for help to the next descendant of Solo- 
mon and the chief synagogue-seats of Jerusalem. 

And, in sooth, Nazareth cannot produce the con- 
ventional great man. The man it sends out is one 
whom the world suffers because it must. But who 
would willingly trust his son to the hard training or 




394 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



the visionary aims of the Judaean street preacher? 
Our common standards are conventional, and any 
departure from them is, in the vast majority of 
households, thought of only with dread. Even our 
great men, who have gained their strength from 
struggles with poverty and disparagement, are 
anxious to shield their own children from gradua- 
tion in the same rough University, and virtually 
consecrate them to the conventional idols. There 
probably has never been a great thinker, poet, or 
scholar, from whom some tributary of power might 
not be traced back to where it was held in a 
brain or character formed amid the humble realities 
and the discipline of manual labour. Yet perhaps 
the best relation between them and the lowly 
workers may be that expressed by Heine : " I love 
the people, but I love them at a distance. I have 
always battled for the emancipation of the people — 
that has been the business of my life ; still, in the 
hottest moments of the fight I have shrunk from 
the least contact with the masses." 



in 



HERE are, indeed, two vicious extremes of 
Society — two corresponding classes — from 
whom little is to be hoped : the agricul- 
tural labourers, reduced by ignorance, drudgery, 
and servility to a colourless mass of stupidity; 



THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 



395 



and those whom hereditary wealth and genera- 
tions of luxurious idleness have rendered almost 
equally characterless and brainless. But of the 
classes between these — the artisan and the middle 
class — there is no reason to think that less is to 
be anticipated from the training of the former 
than from that of the latter, in their respective 
bearing upon the political or intellectual develop- 
ment of the country. The artisan is the intimate 
neighbour of fact and reality. Theories and fancies 
will not hammer his iron or hew his stone. Every 
stroke of his arm translates the law of cause and 
effect. The superstition of the savage, that he ab- 
sorbs the strength of the foe he slays, is fulfilled 
for this wrestler with the hardness of nature. The 
crude thing moulded to his will prints its history on 
the character. Patience, Perseverance, Courage, 
Necessity, form the habit of his mind. No insin- 
cerity or trick can serve in his struggle ; in every 
case so much real effect answers the like real force 
put forth. He is independent, too ; his capital is 
in his hand, and he has not mortgaged his opinions 
for an estate or a family name. His creed is, 
perhaps unconsciously for the present, Laborare est 
orare. Such qualities must be, in whatever crude 
form, mixed with the artisan class like the alu- 
minium diffused in clay, or stretching like veins of 
marble and metal through the stratum to which the 
artisan belongs. The gold slept in California for a long 



396 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



time before the miners came. But can human 
society go on with its shams and formalisms, its 
shreds of Red Tape for politics, and its puppet-show 
religions, for want of just those real and practical 
qualities which are stored up in the common people ? 
Shall we long prefer cobwebs to words of iron and 
steel ? 



VERYWHERE our thinkers, dreamers, 
poets, are recognising in the people an 
as yet unconstituted Court of Appeal. 
He who has an idea not yet received is sustained 
by the belief that mankind will ultimately give it 
due embodiment. The visionary, looking to the 
people, sees of the travail of his soul, and is 
satisfied. The reformer, the martyr, know well 
that the coarseness of the masses is superficial and 
temporary; their ultimate justice is certain. 



HO shall be the Man of the People ? 

Will Democracy, as some apprehend, 
abolish great men ? Will it raise the 
mass and lower the individual ? Are we to pay 
the splendid exceptional names for the more 
intelligent aggregate, and bring down the mountain 
summits to fill up the valleys ? 

No doubt certain kinds of distinction may pass 





THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 397 

away before the elevation of the people. Already 
it seems doubtful if the West can see another 
Wellington or another Napoleon I. It requires 
warlike ages to produce such men; and such 
ages require peoples capable of being thoroughly 
drilled and massed. The development of individual 
opinion, the evolution of personal interests, tend to 
discussion, arbitration, therefore to peace. That 
crowns must be lowered needs no proof. Already 
it is not for the opinions of the Royal Heads of 
England, Prussia, or Austria, that men care, but for 
those of Gladstone, Bismarck, Yon Beust. The 
one crown which stood out above ministries is being 
lowered. And as crowns sink into mere ornaments, 
aristocracies also, resting upon accidental, not real, 
advantages, must fade away. The diplomatist, too, 
— Siitxbog, or double-faced man, that is, — can hardly 
be a hero again. The people have uttered no very 
loud cry for duplicity as yet. We can well spare 
such eminences. There was a mysterious period in 
the history of our planet which seems to have de- 
manded things that swam about like animate islands, 
or stalked through forests, thirty feet high in their 
claws. When the time drew nigh that they should 
disappear, no doubt they met in conclave, and de- 
plored that, under the levelling tendencies of Nature, 
they were to be reduced ; and contempt enough 
probably was heaped upon a poor little two-legged 
animal, only five or six feet high, beginning to 



398 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



compete for forest and swamp with megalosau- 
rians of position and of ancient families. Caesar, 
Charlemagne, Napoleon, Wellington, Talleyrand, 
Palmerston, — what are they beside the brain of the 
Stratford poacher and London play-writer ? They 
are subjects for the palaeontologist of history. 

But will the elevation of the people tend to 
reduce the salient summits of human character and 
genius ? 

Let a graduated scale be made of the compara- 
tive degree to which in all countries the people have 
been admitted to power, and the scale will stand 
as well for the comparative number of distinguished 
philanthropists and literary men in the same. 

How many poets under the Tsar? How many 
men of science under the Pope ? 

America, as yet in her babyhood, has already 
produced finer thinkers than Austria can reckon at 
the end of her centuries. Nor are there any names 
in America of which the people are more proud 
than those of Franklin, Emerson, Motley, Irving, 
Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow, Chan- 
ning, Phillips, and Theodore Parker. These men 
were or are men of the people, and not one of them 
has ever been a reactionist against the cause of 
human equality. 

The Man of the People is to come out of the 
heart of the people, and be related to it. He shall 
inherit their integral force. All the darkly- stored 



THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 399 



elements of the coal-seam shall shine out in that 
diamond. It seems very long ago now since 
Democracy was answered, — " The coarse will elect 
the coarse, the ignorant choose ignoramuses: each 
will vote for the man who most reflects his own 
baseness or prejudice." Yes, long ago; for since 
then the masses have been heard shouting for Mill, 
applauding Carlyle along the streets of Edinburgh ; 
the Laureate must hide from their enthusiasm ; they 
crowd the halls where Dickens reads, or Stanley 
preaches, or Huxley lectures. They have been 
sending the House of Commons its chief literary 
men. It is Oxford that rids itself of " that 
damned intellect : " it is vulgar Greenwich which 
receives and sustains the most scholarly Prime 
Minister England ever had. And the thinkers for 
whom the people have shown most enthusiasm are, 
in nine cases out of ten, those who have vigorously 
confronted popular errors and superstitions. 

The Man of the People must be the interpreter of 
their hearts, not the smooth reflector of the dismal 
outside of them which they are ashamed of, and are 
clamouring for teachers to help them get rid of. 
He shall be genuine, at least, as they ; not uttering 
cheap applause of things accepted, but words costly 
as Luther's or Knox's, to speak which is as genuine 
and perilous work as that of the miner underground. 
However fine or transcendent, the great man hence- 
forth must be the son of his time, bearing upon him 



400 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



the burden of its sins and afflictions ; without com- 
pliance ; not by any means doing his work for the 
past, or for posterity. If Jesus had gone 1800 years 
backward to find his work, we should probably hear 
as little of him now as the future will of the stupid 
brother who occupies the bright Sunday morning 
with his master's fulminations against the Pharisees. 
We get even less from those who fancy unborn 
generations will be dependent on their speculations. 
The men of past days who serve us even now were 
they whose work was put forth to meet the human 
need before them, by the same laws that, by steady 
adaptation of means to ends, gave each insect its an- 
tennas, and man his faculties ; which now in other 
spheres must translate the law by which they have 
been formed into a method of work, if they would 
do anything of real or permanent value. That 
which is clone for this hour, and in its light, other 
hours may not recognise, but will surely feel. 
The (e Coming Man" will, like Homer, sing his 
song to his villagers. He will be related to his 
time and country as hook to eye. The proverb of 
dwellers amid deserts is, " He who digs a well or 
plants a grove is sure of heaven." 

" Things are not what they seem," says the poet. 
Things are oftener the reverse of what they seem, 
adds the man of science. Our fathers said the sun 
moved round the earth — we know the earth moves 
round the sun. They said the earth is flat — we 



THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 401 



know it to be of the form farthest from flatness. 
They said the sky is solid, a firmament — we know 
it to be the thinnest of fluids. But in the moral, more 
than in the external, world, the actual knowledge 
of the present is diametrically opposite to the super- 
ficial impressions of pre-scientific ages. A salient in- 
stance is the change in the estimate of man. Great 
men have, indeed, in every age recognised the 
worth of man. The Hebrew poet saw him as one 
crowned by the Deity with glory and honour, and 
Paul saw him to be " the temple of the living God." 
Mencius said, " He who knows his nature, knows 
heaven ;" Plato said, (( He who knows himself, 
knows all things in himself;" and Socrates did but 
translate the Greek word avQpwitos in saying, 
" There is a natural love of wisdom in the mind of 
man :" preparing the way thus for Hermes' sentence, 
" Man is a mortal God," and the warning of the 
Theurgists, " On beholding yourself, fear !" " The 
intelligible Deity is understood with the flower of 
the intellect," said Zoroaster. And, indeed, there 
is no man who has seriously influenced mankind, 
who has not lived and thought under a sense of the 
grandeur of man. But the summit of human nature 
requires a mind large enough to create the per- 
spective necessary for seeing it. The average mind, 
impaled by the care of the moment, its eye riveted to 
the foreground, sees but the coarse surface of man- 
kind, and holds their nature cheap and vile. Thus all 

c C 



4-02 AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 

religions are infected with the contempt of man, 
and the majority are based upon the belief in his 
degradation. The Ark can be touched only by 
the few anointed ones. The Eleusinian Mysteries 
could not begin until the priest had cried, " Hence, 
ye profane !" Jesus gave the sop to Judas ; but the 
Catechumens said, " Holy things to holy men." 
It was not difficult to imagine such wretched 
creatures being damned by the million. 

Whether it was because the East swarmed with 
superfluous populations at a time when in the West 
every man counted for something, or because of the 
inherent genius of the German people, certain it 
is, that the common people in Northern Europe 
were always held in esteem, if not reverence. They 
related that the daughter of a giant came to her 
father's castle with something folded in her apron. 
u What hast thou there ? " asked the giant, " A 
beautiful plaything which I found crawling about in 
a field." With that she took from her apron a 
peasant with his plough and oxen. The giant said 
sternly, " Go, put those creatures back where thou 
didst find them. If the dwarf folk laboured not in 
the valley, it would fare ill with the giants in the 
mountain." 

It is not a little droll to see the religion based 
on contempt and denial of man half digested by the 
race which produced such a fable as this. What 
competition to gather in these totally-depraved 



THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 



wretches ! What endless societies to seek and save 
the men and women whom God holds so merely 
damnable ! Millions of money shall go to provide 
that every perishing pauper shall at least starve 
with a tract in his hand, and that the savage of the 
South Seas, though he eat his missionary, shall at 
least be induced to say Christian grace over him. 
Nay, every theory, philosophy, doctrine, leaps into 
the arena, crying, " My kingdom for a majority I" 




HERE is but one institution which has not 
shared the general tendency and passion 
for the recovery and elevation of the poor 
— the Christian Church. While clamorous for 
their allegiance, it sees unmoved that very class 
to which Jesus belonged, to follow which to .the 
hill-sides he abandoned the Churches of his time, 
wandering shepherdless on the bleak rocks of 
Atheism. " Artisan " is fast becoming in England 
another name for infidel, as "turner" already is in 
Germany. The alienation of the people from the 
Church is, indeed, no new thing ; but it is now for 
the first time that a Tribunal has been formed 
able to hear and decide on the case of the ignorant 
and the poor against the false Shepherds. That 
Tribunal has been formed by the increased hu- 
manity of every department of human interest 



404 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



except the Church. Government, Science, Litera- 
ture, Art, Social Philosophy, absorbed in the 
problem of human welfare, turn now, and say of 
the one institution that to the cry for bread 
offers a dogmatic stone, " Why cumbereth it the 
ground?" 

It is but natural that the gardeners should 
petition for time in which to dig about the barren 
tree, and try to make it bear fruit ; but how can we 
hope for such a result when the very life has ebbed 
away from its roots ? Time was when the leading 
thought and scholarship were in the Church; now 
their pulpit is the magazine, the daily press, the 
hall of science, Parliament. How can the Churches 
guide the people, when all their sermons for a year 
cannot gain as much attention as a single lecture 
by Professor Tyndall on Dust ? 

The Church might, indeed, be left to the processes 
of natural decay, were it not occupying the place 
where a true Church might stand, giving to 
starving souls those solutions of their doubts which 
thinkers have gained for themselves in their soli- 
tudes, but are now without the means of bringing 
to bear on the dismal riot of unbelief and despair. 
When men are drowning, they who cannot save 
must at least not be permitted to use the life-boats 
for pleasure excursions. 



THE PILGRIM'S LAST REFLECTIONS. 405 

ND now to you, O freethinkers, liberals, 
emancipated souls, the Pilgrim utters this 
his final word. 
We have deeply learned that God is our Father ! 
we need to feel as deeply that every man is our 
brother. Who of you, if his own son or brother 
were the victim of some delusion that darkened 
life, would spare effort to relieve him of it ? Yet 
all around us are the children of our common 
Father tossed from the delusion that God is a 
Tyrant to the delusion that there is no God at all. 
As we look into the past, we see what men have 
done for the love of Christ, — what they have sur- 
rendered and endured in their misdirected zeal and 
passion for him whom they adored as a" Saviour. As 
much as they loved the dead, let us love the living 
Christ — Humanity. Surely Truth and Spiritual 
Liberty should not have less power to animate and 
inspire, or to command sacrifices, than Superstition ! 

There is a story of the Holy Grail which the 
Laureate has passed by, but which we may remember. 
In the days when men wandered through the world 
seeking that cup, made of a single precious stone, 
holding the real blood of Christ, a Knight left 
England to search for the same in distant lands. 
As he passed from his door, a poor sufferer cried to 
him for help. Absorbed in his grand hope, the 
Knight heeded him not, but went on. He wandered 
to the Holy Land, fought in many wars, endured 




406 



AN EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. 



much, but found not the precious cup ; and at last, 
disappointed and dejected, he returned home. As 
he neared his own house, the same poor sufferer 
cried to him for help. " What dost thou require ?" 
asked the Knight. The aged man said, (( Lo, I am 
perishing with thirst." The Knight dismounted and 
hastened to fetch a cup of water. He held the 
half-clad sufferer in his arms, raised his head, and 
proffered the water to his parched lips. Even as he 
did so the cup sparkled into a gem, and the knight 
saw in his hand the Holy Grail, flushed with the 
true blood of Christ. And you, my brothers, may 
wander far, and traverse many realms of philosophy 
and theology, to find the truth which represents the 
true life-blood of the noblest soul; but you shall 
find it only when and where you love and serve as 
he did. If you can but give to the fainting soul 
at your door a cup of water from the wells of truth, 
it shall flash back on you the radiance of God. As 
you can save, so shall you be saved. And be you 
sure that when you are really moved by the 
outcries of famished hearts and brains, as by the 
wailings of helpless babes, — when you deeply long 
to bear light and hope to men, — the ways of doing 
so will open before you, even as undreamed energies 
to fill them full shall be born within you. 



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